


The Moisture Farmer's Wife

by celinamarniss



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Force Woo, Meeting the Parents, Padme makes a few cameo appearances sort of, Post - Vision of the Future, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-01 10:08:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 39,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15771963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celinamarniss/pseuds/celinamarniss
Summary: After touching a mysterious Jedi artifact, Mara is swept back in time to Tatooine three decades earlier. Taken in by Owen and Beru, she has to figure out how to get home without revealing who she is. On top of that, her future husband is just a kid, and it'sweird.





	1. Arrival

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to JediMordSith for beta and moral support. 
> 
> The name of the fic is a nod to novel _The Time Traveler's Wife_ by Audrey Niffenegger.

The E2-5 unit that monitored the condensing units on the south ridge had been on the fritz for months. Luke had said so to his Uncle and Aunt, who had sighed and said that they knew it wasn’t working properly, but they didn’t have time to fix it right now.

“That Eetwo is older than _Luke,”_ Beru said at dinner. “Eetwos aren’t meant to last that long.”

“I know,” Uncle Owen sighed. “I was hoping it would last another season.”

“I could take it with me when I go out to Anchorhead in a few days,” Beru said.

“Can I come with you?” Luke asked, looking up quickly from his plate.  

“Maybe,” Aunt Beru said. “Eat your mushrooms.”

Luke grumbled, but did as his aunt told him.  

Later that night, the restraining bolt on the E2-5 unit overloaded, and the addled machine had rolled out onto the desert, leaving a wide track across the salt flat that disappeared into the distance. Someone had to go out and bring it back. Luke begged Uncle Owen to bring him along, and his Uncle relented on the condition that when they got back he had to finish his chores and all of his daily lessons without complaining _once_.

They took the small X-2 speeder that Aunt Beru used to drive to neighboring farms, and Uncle Owen headed south, carefully following the track the stretched across the sand. They followed the E2-5’s trail until they spotted the droid, caked with sand, its motor so run down it was barely inching across the ground. Uncle Owen pulled the speeder to a stop nearby and swung out of the vehicle, Luke scrambling after him.

“Can we get it fixed, Uncle Owen?”

“I don’t know, Luke,” Uncle Owen said as he leaned over the E2-5. “This droid might only be good for parts, now.”

Luke watched closely as his Uncle hit the droid’s deactivation button and brushed away some of the sand so that he could lever up a panel and look into the guts of the machine. Luke craned his head, trying to see what his Uncle was seeing in the mass of wires and gears.

Then Luke felt— _something_ —it was like a tug, but in his head, pulling his attention away from Uncle Owen and the broken droid. It was _weird_. He straightened and squinted into the distance, where the flat desert began to give way to a sea of sand dunes. There was _something_ there. He couldn’t see it, but he knew he had to find it. He began to run toward the dunes, leaving his Uncle still hunched over the Eetwo.

“Luke! What are you—Luke, come back!”

Luke stopped and trudged back to the speeder. It didn’t feel _right,_ walking away from whatever was out there in the dunes, but he had to listen to his Uncle, particularly when they were away from the farm.

“There’s something out there, Uncle Owen,” he said as he drew near to the speeder again.

“Where? What did you see?”

“I dunno. I can’t _see it_ , exactly. It’s over there.” He pointed at the distant dunes.  

Uncle Owen’s face had that pinched look it got when he was worried or angry, and he stood and pulled out his macrobinoculars, grunting as he pulled the focus. “Yeah, there’s something there. Not sure what it is, though. It isn’t moving. Could be a dead animal.”

“Can I see?”

Through the binoculars Luke could see a dark lump in the dune, sticking out of the sand. It definitely wasn’t a rock.

“Can we go see what it is?”

Uncle Owen didn’t answer at first, taking back the binoculars and scanning the desert in every direction. Luke shifted impatiently, though he knew that his Uncle was scanning the area for any evidence that this was a trap. They couldn’t be too careful out on the Dune Sea.

“Nothing else in sight,” Uncle Owen concluded, tucking the macrobinoculars away.

“Can we take a look?”

“First we need to get this droid on the back of the speeder,” Uncle Owen said. “Then we’ll take a look. But I don’t want any trouble. If it’s a dead animal, don’t touch it.”

“Okay, Uncle Owen.”

The E2-5 was heavy, and Luke helped as much as he could, even though he was much smaller than his Uncle. He knew the faster they got the droid stowed, the sooner they could check out the thing in the dunes. It was still tugging at his head, an insistent pull that didn’t let up even as they climbed back into the speeder and coasted across the dunes, toward the mysterious _something_.

“Uncle Owen, look!” There was female urusai circling in the air above the thing in the dunes, still high up.

Uncle Owen glanced up at the carrion reptavian. “Thing’s dead or dead soon,” he said. The urusai lifted higher into the sky as they approached, though it didn’t give up its insistent circling.

Luke jumped out of the speeder before it came to a stop, even though he knew his Uncle would yell at him. He stumbled toward the thing in the dune, nearly losing his footing when the sand slid under his feet. He felt a greater urgency than ever, pulling him forward.

It was a woman, half buried, her bright red hair spilling over the sand.

“Luke, don’t touch—”  

But Luke had already rushed over to the woman, dropping to his knees and reaching out to shake her shoulder. She stirred, making a muffled sound, and then lifted her head, blinking green eyes up at him.

“—Not happening,” the woman muttered before she passed out again, her head falling back into the sand.

 

— —

 

It was well after dark when Mara arrived home, and the night air had grown brisk enough that she pulled her wool coat close as she left the speeder hanger and entered the lift. Her meeting with the Ithorian Minister of Trade had run long, and her stomach growled pointedly as she stepped out of the lift and again as she keyed in the door code to the apartment.

Once inside, Mara shucked off her coat and hung it in the alcove beside the door, her hand brushing across the dark cloak that hung next to it. The apartment was quiet, and she was disappointed that she hadn’t been greeted by the smell of dinner cooking in the air.

“Luke?”

“In here,” he called from the dining room.

She hoped he’d already set dinner out. She began to pull the pins out of her hair as she headed down the hall, letting it fall out of a formal updo to her shoulders. As she moved through the apartment she slipped the buttons on her jacket with one hand and dropped her work case, ID cards, and hairpins on a table in the sitting room with the other, shedding away the trappings of her day.

The apartment still felt relatively new, although they’d already unpacked and furnished the rooms (following a fascinating and _frustrating_ series of negotiations over what went where and who had a say in how it all looked). They had only been living together in the new apartment for a relatively short time—Luke had given up his place in the Imperial Palace, she’d moved out of her small quarters in the Trade District, and they’d picked out a spacious apartment in the upscale Jrade District shortly before the wedding.

Her hand paused at the buckle of her lightsaber belt as the dining room came into view. The floor, the chairs, and half the table were covered by bins, many half-open with their contents strewn about in piles that covered the remaining available surfaces. From where she stood it looked as though the stacks of bins continued into the kitchen, too.

A sharp flash of irritation shot through her as she stared at the mess. She tried to squash the feeling, but it must have flared like a signal fire if the guilty-looking expression Luke shot her from the corner of his eye was any indication. He looked up from where he leaned over the dining table, covered with an odd collection of items.

“I’m sorry,” he said, wincing and gesturing toward the table. “I got caught up in something. I can clean this up if you want to eat dinner in here.”

“No, it’s fine,” she said. “I wasn’t planning on cooking anything, anyway, and we can order in and eat in the living room.”  

She made her way around the stacks of bins, headed for the kitchen where they had a comm system for ordering meals, but he stepped into her path, hands settling firmly on her waist and his mouth gently coaxing against hers.

“Long day?” he said as he broke the kiss.  

“Yeah,” she murmured, resting her hands on his chest and feeling her irritation melt away as she soaked in the warmth of his presence. “The Ithorians like to talk. Our meetings always run over.”

He reached out and snagged a hairpin she’d missed, dropping it on the table and running his fingers through her hair. She leaned into his touch as his hand slid to the back of her head. The restless part of her that was always on the defense slipped away in his presence as he stroked at the nape of the neck.

“Minister Alawan?”

She nodded. “They asked about you.” She was still adjusting to being the wife of _Luke Skywalker_ , war hero and Jedi master. Everyone knew his name, and now they all assumed that meant they knew _her._

“What did you say?” He had a soft, fond look on his face; his mouth a half-smile.

“Oh, nothing _inappropriate.”_ She tilted her head, flashing him a smile of her own, one with too many teeth.

She’d learned so many wonderful, _inappropriate_ things about Luke Skywalker since she married him — things she’d never tell anyone. For instance, he _liked_ the smile that made other beings step back and reconsider their chances of leaving an encounter with her with all their limbs intact. He kissed her again, showing her how _much._

Her stomach gave another audible rumble, and he broke off, laughing.

She rolled her eyes and cocked her head toward the table. “I was hoping to come home to dinner, not to a table covered with…Jedi artifacts?” She looked over the items he’d spread across the table, an assemblage of oddly carved stone objects.

“Yeah. Han found them—well, actually, some contact of his with connections to the black market on Obroa-skai picked them up and passed them on to Han to pass on to me. The dealer told him a story about how they were scavenged from an ancient Jedi temple.” He shifted one of the artifacts around on the table as he spoke, rearranging the pattern. His other hand slid from her hip to her lower back and rested there.

“His idea of a wedding gift was illegally acquired artifacts?”

“You know Han; it could have been worse. These pieces are interesting, but I don’t really know what to make of them. This one here—” he pointed to the disk. “It reminded me of a similar artifact I found in Ben’s house on Tatooine. I thought I kept it, but I’ve been searching all afternoon and I can’t find it.”

“And you had to dig through every box you had in storage.”

“Yeah,” he said, wincing a little. “Sorry.”

She shrugged a shoulder. It was done.

“It does make me wonder what else is moving through Obroa-skai,” he continued. “Might be worth it to take a trip out there and see what else they’ve got.”

 _“Not_ my idea of a honeymoon,” Mara said.

Her husband grinned back at her. “You told me yourself that you didn’t want anything _boring._ ”

“Hunting down Jedi artifacts was _not_ what I had in mind.” His Jedi artifact expeditions always seemed to end up being more trouble than they were worth.

“Hm,” he said, looking back down at the table.

She ran the last part of the exchange through her head again and frowned. “If that’s what you want?” she offered tentatively. If he really wanted to go, she could compromise—  

“No, not really,” he said. “I was just kidding.”

“Good,” she said quickly to cover her relief, ignoring his grin.

His hair was starting to get long again, the ends curling at his collar. She reached out and snagged one of the curls, still half-amazed that she could _do that,_ that she could touch him whenever she wanted. He grinned at her and she couldn’t help the smile that spread across her face in response. That warm feeling — _happiness_ — had never been so easy for her to access before, and she was often startled by how close it was to the surface now, bubbling up like a spring whenever he looked at her like _that._

“You need a haircut,” she told him.

He made a face, startled by the change of topic, and then said, “I’ll comm for dinner?”

“Please.”

He brushed a quick kiss across her cheek and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving her standing alone in the dining room beside the table.

She studied the objects he’d left on the table, several lumpish stones and a larger stone disk with a hole in the center, elaborate runes and figures carved into the surface of the artifacts. The runes were vaguely reminiscent of ancient symbols she’d seen on other Jedi artifacts, in the same way that archaic religious symbols often resembled each other to the untrained eye. Jedi artifact identification was not her area of expertise.

She was still examining the artifacts when Luke returned, running a finger along the notches that ringed the disk’s circle.

“Some kind of timekeeping device, maybe?”

“That’s a good guess,” Luke said. He leaned close to her, his hand stroking against her lower back.  

“As good as any, I suppose.”

“What does the Force tell you?” he said.

She shot him an exasperated look. “You’re incorrigible.” And, from his expression, unrepentant. He shifted slightly away as he reached across the table to push some other odds and ends—a datapad, what looked like packing material—out of the way.

She hadn’t had much practice using the Force to draw impressions—memories or emotions left behind by sentients—out of objects, but she knew the basics of the technique. Since Nirauan, her connection with the Force had deepened, and she felt attuned to the galaxy in ways she’d never thought possible. It was as if she had been half-blind her entire life and upon finally receiving ocular implants could now see the entire world in brilliant color—so bright it made her head spin sometimes.

After the peace accords with the Empire had been signed and before the wedding, she had spent a few months on Yavin, running through training exercises she had missed and completing the test and trials that were becoming standard for Luke’s Jedi apprentices. Luke had argued that she’d already proved herself on Nirauan, but that had been a private ordeal, and she wanted to establish that she had a _right_ to her place in Luke’s Order.

As much as she’d improved, psychometry was an esoteric technique that she still had yet to master. Her fingers began to play across the device in an unconscious pattern, following the loops and lines in the runes that covered the disk. For a second, she thought she felt a flash of heat, and an impression like music playing in another room, but when she pressed her palm to the artifact, it still registered as cold stone.

Nothing.

She lifted her hand away from the disk and felt a snap across her palm like an electric shock.

“What happened?” Luke asked.

“I don’t know.” She lowered her hand to the stone once again. “There’s something there—”  

She was falling so fast it felt like her stomach had jumped into her throat, as though the floor had suddenly evaporated into empty space, as if she’d fallen into a void without stars. The blackness engulfed her, so instantaneously she hadn’t had time to think. One moment she was next to Luke and then she was gone—

She slammed her eyes shut against a sudden blinding light a second before her entire body made contact with the ground, knocking the wind out of her. The surface she’d landed on was gritty under her cheek, tiny grains flowing between her grasping fingers and into her mouth as she sucked in a lungful of dry air. _Sand,_ her stunned brain supplied. The light hadn’t let up and she slowly peeled open her eyes, squinting as she struggled to adjust to the glare of the sun.

Her stomach twisted, and she turned her head to heave onto the ground. When her stomach had stopped trying to force its contents out of her mouth she ran a hand across her lips and lifted herself to her knees and then to her feet, staggering on the shifting sandbank. She was surrounded by rolling dunes of sand in all directions, the sky above a pale blue dome lit with the harsh light of two suns.

Two suns.

Tatooine. Of all the Force-cursed planets—

There wasn’t anything in sight that indicated that she hadn’t been transported to a desert on any number of planets with binary systems; there wasn’t anything except sand in all directions. There had to be thousands of deserts planets, and who knew how many of those boasted two suns in their sky. But Mara _knew;_ where else would a kriffing Force portal send her?

Fucking.

Tatooine.

She kicked sand over the spot where she’d heaved up her stomach contents. It had been a waste of precious fluid, but there was nothing she could do about it now. Even more than the sun, dehydration was her enemy here.

She still had her lightsaber and holdout blaster, since she hadn’t gotten around to taking them off when she’d been transported. Little good they would do her if she was far enough from a settlement or any sort of animal she could shoot and eat.

She needed to _find_ the closest settlement, and the sooner the better. She didn’t have her ID on her, or a single credit, but if she could get to an off-planet comm, that would be easy enough to sort out. Karrde was sure to have local contacts on Tatooine, or whatever this planet was, who could help her arrange a trip back to Coruscant. She could access several lines of personal credit as soon as she found a reliable holonet connection.

A gust of wind sent sand stinging against her skin. She pivoted in place, searching the horizon for any clue as to which direction would lead her to sentient habitation. Nothing.

There were other ways to search. She let her eyes fall shut again as she reached into the Force, easing into the flow of it and letting the world drop away from her. When she opened them again, the direction she was facing looked just as blank and empty as the rest of the desert, but there was a strange tug at the back of her head that compelled her to head forward.

She put one booted foot in front of the other, and began to walk.

Hours passed.

At least—it felt like hours, though she felt like her grasp of time was slipping away as she trudged through the endless, featureless, monotonous desert. Her skin felt tight and hot as the sun beat down on her, and the landscape shivered in the heat before her.

Still she walked.

Another hour. 

Some distance ahead it looked as though the sand dunes flattened out, giving way to a vast plain of cracked, dun-colored earth. Her feet were beginning to drag and dehydration was making her feel sluggish and lightheaded. She hadn’t eaten since lunch, hours ago and half a galaxy away.

She tripped and came down hard, her hands smacking into the rough sand. She lay still for a moment, stunned by the impact, before she sucked in a few ragged breaths and hauled herself up. Her head was throbbing; it swam as she got her feet under her again.

_One foot in front of the other. Keep going. Keep moving._

The next time she fell she didn’t realize she’d passed out until she was jolted out of it—someone was shaking her—and barely holding on to consciousness, she lifted her head and looked up into the face of a young boy. He looked concerned, his light hair falling across his blue eyes as he crouched over her. It took a moment for her to register his Force signature.

“This is _not_ happening,” she said, and then blacked out again.

 


	2. Day Two

Mara had woken shortly after her rescue when a stranger heaved her into a bed and someone held a cup of water to her lips. She drank, the throbbing in her head making it hard to think and her body not responding properly. She should have been annoyed by that, but she was just _so tired._

She was in a dimly lit room, and there was someone speaking softly to her, but she didn't have the energy to work out where she was or even to respond to whatever it was they were asking her. She had enough presence of mind to drop herself a healing trance before she passed out again. She didn’t like depending on a healing trance in an unsecured, unfamiliar location, but something had reassured her that she’d be safe—

_Luke._

He was near, somehow, and that fact calmed her enough to allow her to surrender to the Force. She still sensed the glimmer of his presence nearby when she woke from her trance, an unmistakable signature that she knew as well as her own.

And yet—memories of the last few hours flickered back—and she recalled the face of the boy who pulled her out of the desert swimming to the surface. Luke.

Karking _hells_.

She reached out desperately for the other end of the link that connected her to Luke—to _her_ Luke—and could only sense a faint echo that reverberated through the bond. W hat had he called it? _The other half of my heart_. She’d called him soft-headed for such a sentimental phrase. There was nothing sentimental about the ache—the vicious, searing ache—she felt at his absence.

Though the bond between them hadn’t broken, it was strained by light years and decades of distance. The distance between where she belonged and _here,_ the Tatooine of his childhood, an era that was long gone.

_What the kriff was she doing here?_

Her rescuers had put her in a modest single room. She lifted herself stiffly out of bed, digging her toes into the cheerfully patterned rug on the floor. Someone had removed her blouse and pants and hung them over the back of the room’s only chair. Her holdout holster, stripped of its weapon, had been placed on a nearby table, and her boots had been placed neatly by the side of the bed. They’d taken her lightsaber as well. She threw the blouse back on over her camisole and put her pants and boots back on. The outfit had been chosen for a business meeting, and could not have been more out of place; even the short, stylish boots were more suited for the city and were already covered with a layer of grime from her trek through the desert.

Down a short hallway she found a small fresher, and after relieving herself, glanced in the mirror that hung over the hand sanitizer unit. Her sunburn had faded during the trance but a layer of skin was peeling off in disgusting flakes. She made a face, rubbing at her forehead. The healing trance had cured the sunstroke and severe dehydration, but it didn’t keep her from looking exactly as though she’d been baked in the desert for a day, and there was nothing she could do about that.

She’d painted her fingernails the morning before—no, two mornings ago—for a gathering they’d attended that night. It felt like more than two days had passed. The color was a red so deep it looked black in the fresher’s electric light, and they were already beginning to crack and flake around the edges. She picked at a fraying edge. At least they covered up the desert grit that had accumulated under her nails, she supposed. She’d have to ask her hosts for some remover, she thought, after scrubbing her hands again.

A flight of stairs led to the circular courtyard in the center of the dwelling, with high red walls above whitewashed pourstone staircases and entryways, open to the sky above. She winced at the bright sunlight, raising a hand over her eyes before they adjusted to the light. A water vaporator dominated the center of the courtyard, which was spotted with well-tended greenery. Scanning the doors that were set into the walls of the sunken courtyard, she picked out the entryway to a dining room, and stepped into the courtyard, blinking in the sun. It was cooler than she expected in the shade, but Tatooine was still hotter than any place in the galaxy had a right to be.

“You’re awake.” A woman’s voice drew her gaze to a doorway a few yards away.

The woman was in her mid-thirties, her light hair pulled back into a knot at the nape of her neck. They were about the same age, give or take a few years. She wore a roughly-woven blue jacket with a brown patterned tunic underneath it, a dark blue skirt, and plain boots. She seemed surprised to see Mara, which made sense considering the condition Mara had been in when they’d found her, and she had a look of thoughtful concern on her face.

Mara knew that face. Beru Whitesun Lars— _Aunt Beru._ Seeing the other woman standing there in the flesh confirmed what she had already known, though she had hoped down to her bones that it wasn’t true.

“How are you feeling?” Beru asked. She crossed the courtyard. “You didn’t look so good when Owen and Luke found you.”

“I’m fine,” Mara said. “Much better, thank you.”

“You do look much better,” Beru said, looking her up and down.

This was like something out of one of those tawdry holos the crew used to watch on the _Wild Karrde_ ; ridiculous stories of people traveling through time to kill or screw their parents, and always finding themselves embroiled in major historical events. She could never stand how illogical the plots of those stories were, but it now occurred to her that most of what she knew about time travel had been drawn from a handful of trashy holos. Her knowledge of advanced temporal theory was negligible. According to those holos, there was always a chance that a time traveler could alter the timeline and destroy the future by simply saying the wrong word or being the wrong place.

She had to be careful, then.

“My name is Mara.” A name couldn’t hurt, and her name was one that neither of them would ever hear while they lived.

“I’m Beru,” the other woman smiled. “But you must be starving. Come,” Beru motioned to an entryway behind her.

She followed Beru through the arched entryway that led into the dining room, the rounded ceiling overhead painted in abstract patterns above a plain plastoid table and a set of chairs. Beru indicated with a gesture that Mara should sit at the table, and then disappeared down a flight of stairs at the far end of the room, returning with a tray, and passed her a bowl filled with a pale-colored mush.

“Anka juice,” Beru placed a plastic cup beside her bowl. “It’ll help rehydrate you.”

The mush didn’t have much taste, but Mara didn’t hesitate to fill her pinched stomach. The cup was cool in her hand, and the anka juice was a pale green color and felt slimy as it ran down her throat. It helped chase away the lingering lightheaded feeling of extreme dehydration that the trance couldn’t cure.

Beru left the dining room while Mara ate and returned with a man her age, wearing the tan robes of a Tatooine farmer. Uncle Owen.

She’d first seen those faces in an Imperial Intelligence file on the wanted insurgent Luke Skywalker. The couple had been much older looking in the holos, which were already marked _deceased_ by the time Mara viewed them, right before she was sent on a mission to kill the man they’d raised. Luke had a few family holos, and the flickers of memory she’d seen in Luke’s mind through the Force bond were mostly impressionistic, colored with intense emotion.

“She’s awake!” A small boy stood in the arched doorway, leaning around Uncle Owen.

Mara stared at him. She had hoped, _hoped_ that she’d landed sometime before Luke had been adopted, though Force knew she didn’t _expect_ to be that lucky.

“Hullo,” he said to Mara. “I’m Luke.”

She hesitated, but he’d already seen her. A name wouldn’t make much difference at this point, would it?

“I’m Mara.” There was no indication that she’d broken the timeline; not even a shiver in the Force. She glanced at Beru and Owen. “I’m just… passing through.”

“Your Uncle and I need to talk with our guest,” Beru said. “Privately. Please go to your room and look over your history holos.”

“Aww, Aunt Beru,” he whined.

“Go on, now,” Owen said firmly.

“Okay, okay,” he said as he slunk away.

She didn’t think that the Solo kids would have obeyed without an argument, though she was at a loss as to whether that came down to age, how they were raised, Han’s genes, or some other element of child-rearing that she couldn’t possibly grasp.

“Owen Lars,” Owen said, offering her a hand.  

“Mara Jade,” she said, shaking his hand. “Thank you for rescuing me.”

He took the seat at the head of the table, Beru sitting next to him and across from Mara. Mara pushed her bowl aside and folded her hands on the table. She wasn't armed, but it seemed polite to leave her hands where her hosts could see them. 

“We didn’t get much out of you when we brought you back,” Owen said. “You weren’t very—coherent.”

Kriff, what had she said? “Was I raving?” 

“No,” Beru reassured her quickly. “We just couldn’t get your name or any other information that we could use to help you.”

“We didn’t see a speeder nearby when we found you,” Owen said. “But we can go out and look again if you ran out of fuel.”

Mara shook her head. “My ship crashed,” she said. “Further off. I’d been walking a while.” She kept her face friendly and open—while wincing inwardly. It was a bad lie, and one that would be easily caught if they went looking for her ship. Hopefully, she wouldn’t be around long enough for anyone to wonder.

“We can take you out to your ship later today,” Owen said.

“Ah, no,” Mara said. “It burned up after it crashed. There’s nothing of value left there.”

“We aren’t scavengers,” Owen bristled, giving her a good idea of where scavengers and looters fell in Owen’s worldview.

“No, of course not,” she said quickly.

“If there was anything to salvage from your ship you could sell it yourself,” Owen said. “I know people who would give you a decent price, and you could use the credits to get yourself home.”

No amount of money would help her get home now.

“Thank you, but it was only a small shuttle and there really wasn’t anything left, except what I had on me.” Speaking of— “Where did you put my blaster?”

“In a safe,” he said. “We don’t keep firearms lying around, not with our nephew on the property.”

Although she was annoyed at having been separated from her weapons, she could understand the logic of disarming a complete stranger they’d found in the desert, and it hadn’t even occurred to her that Owen’s actions were a protective measure for Luke, but in retrospect, she appreciated his concern. She still wanted them back.

“We’ll return it to you, later,” Owen continued. Conditional on her behavior, she assumed; once she’d been determined not to be a threat.

“Where did you get a lightsaber?” Beru asked.

The question caught her by surprise; she hadn’t expected them to be so direct.

“My husband gave it to me,” she said, “It was a family heirloom.” In case they thought she’d taken it off the body of a dead Jedi.

“His family were Jedi?” Owen sounded wary.

“One of his relatives, yes.” It was probably better to play _that_ particular connection down. “Just wearing it works wonders for intimidating people.”

Which was true, and she hoped that they’d assume that she only wore it for that purpose. It was more or less the reason she’d worn it to the business meeting with the Ithorian Minister of Trade, for that matter.

Lightsabers were rare in this era, but it wouldn’t have been completely unheard of for one to resurface in the wake of the purge. The Emperor had declared them illegal, along with anything else associated with the Jedi Order, but this was _Tatooine._

She tried for a conspiratorial smile, which faltered under Owen’s stare. She could tell her answers didn’t make him particularly happy, but neither had any of her other answers. She bit the inside of her cheek, wishing she knew the right words to say to him. Something honest; none of the tricks she knew to charm businessmen and senators would do for hard-working moisture farmers. She could fake charm, to a certain extent, but making herself genuinely likable had never come easy; she didn’t have Luke’s effortless way with people.

“What brought you to Tatooine?” Beru said, breaking the silence. 

Mara turned to her, grateful. “I’m a trader,” she said. Now she was glad that she didn’t have her New Republic ID on her—that would have led to a _lot_ of awkward questions—though having no ID at all, and no credits to her name—not even a peggat—would also be a problem.

“Smuggler,” Owen guessed, an edge of hostility in his voice.

She nodded, and then remembered exactly who ran every smuggler on Tatooine in this decade. “I don’t work for Jabba,” she said.

“Then you’re on the wrong planet,” he said. It was clear he didn’t believe her.

She raised an eyebrow, looking down at herself, at her ragged, sun-and-wind burned appearance. “Clearly.”

He snorted, and she thought she’d won a point.

She thought she could tell a part of the truth, as long as she kept the details fuzzy. “My husband is from Tatooine,” she said. Let them assume that Jade was his family’s name. “We got separated, and I came looking for him here.” It was as good a cover story as any.

“Where on Tatooine?” Beru asked.

She tried to think of the name of a town that was furthest from the Lars farmstead; not Mos Eisley, nor Mos Doba, Mos—Mos Something—she couldn’t remember the name now, and it felt like she was slipping up.

“Mos—Espa? His family was from Mos Espa,” she said, realizing how unconvincing she sounded, even though that, at least, had been the truth. “We haven’t been married long,” she said to cover her faltering answer.

“Oh,” Beru said, and exchanged a look with Owen. What did _that_ mean?

Owen gave her the answer. “You sure he wants to be found? He hasn’t run off with another woman?”

A laugh burst out of her. The idea that Luke would stray, that he would run away from her or leave her for some other woman was incomprehensible; it was _laughable._ Owen and Beru looked startled at her outburst but their looks of mild concern didn’t alter and it was beginning to get on her nerves.

“No,” she shook her head, “he wouldn’t do that.” She slipped her right thumb under her sleeve and rubbed at the skin on the inside of her left wrist. It was a new habit.

On many planets, jewelry was exchanged as a sign of marital status. Neither Luke nor Mara had known what their parents had done to mark their union, and jewelry had seemed impractical. “You’ve already given me your lightsaber,” Mara had said when they’d discussed traditions. Luke had told her that in some Tatooine slave communities, couples or family units wore matching tattoos. Jewelry could be stolen or taken away by a slave master, but a tattoo—unless deliberately removed—would stay with the slave for life.

The tattoo on her left wrist was composed of two interlocking circles, a pair of rings in bright blue. The color of the lightsaber he’d given her, or of his eyes—he should have been here. She knew how much it would mean to him to see his Aunt and Uncle again.

Beru glanced down at Mara’s hands, her eye drawn by the motion of her fingers. Mara suppressed an instinctive urge to cover her wrist. What did it matter if Beru saw the tattoo? The other woman looked over at Owen, communicating something that Mara couldn’t follow, a message that didn’t need words. It reminded her of Leia and Han, the way they spoke to each other in half-finished sentences and the crook of an eyebrow. Owen looked away from Beru, back at Mara, his eyes darting down to her wrist.

Mara clenched her jaw. She couldn’t follow whatever subtextual conversation the Larses were having, and it made her want to _shoot_ something.

“I don’t have any credits to offer you for rescuing me and putting me up, but I’m a decent mechanic,” she said. “I could help with repairs.” Luke had told her that there were always things to repair on a farm; it was how he’d gotten so much practice with machines. “Or anything else.”

Beru and Owen had another one of their silent conversations, and then Beru said, “You’re welcome to stay for a few days until you figure out where you’re headed. I can run you into Bestine in a few days, and you can find transport to Mos Espa from there. Meanwhile, you can help me with a few chores around the homestead.”

“Thank you,” Mara said.

“I have to get back to work,” Owen said, rising to his feet.  

“Would you like to wash up? Properly?” Beru asked Mara. “I can lend you some things to wear.”

She could still wear the slacks she’d thrown on before leaving for work in the morning, but the fine fabric of the blouse she’d chosen with the evening’s meeting in mind would never be the same.

“Yes, that would be nice, thank you.”

 

— —

 

It felt good to finally rid herself of the desert grit that had clung to her skin for over a day, even though the basic sonic in the homestead fresher couldn’t compare to the luxury of a hot water shower back on Coruscant. Beru had loaned her a robe to wear between the fresher and the bedroom where she’d woken up, and back inside the room she found a stack of neatly folded clothes on the bed, enough to wear for the next few days.

She put on a loose cream shirt and a deep blue skirt that fell mid-calf and paired it with a wide decorative leather belt. Mara ran her hand over the intricate tooling on the leather as she cinched it around her waist. It was a lovely thing to offer a guest. There was a jacket, too, of rough, heavy material, to wear in the morning and evenings when it was cold.

She looked like a local, now, except for her pale skin, far paler than a Tatooine native. With that exception, she looked like a moisture farmer’s wife. Well, she _was_ a moisture farmer’s wife, after all, she thought with a twist of her lips. A _former_ moisture farmer.

She missed him.

Beru appeared again when she had finished dressing. “This is a cream that will keep your skin moisturized and protect it from the sun. You should put on every morning when you wake up.” She passed Mara a bottle of skin cream. Mara didn’t recognize the label. A local brand, probably. “Here, you’ll need this if you go outside.”

Mara stared at the object Beru held out. It was a hat, large and floppy and decidedly unattractive. Mara didn’t consider herself a particularly vain person, but she gaped down at the hat, appalled.

“It’s that or get burned again,” Beru said, a pointed look at Mara’s pale skin. Mara took the hat.

“Thank you,” she said. 

Beru asked for her help in finishing up the afternoon chores—an obvious tactic to keep an eye on her, and so she spent the rest of the day following Beru around like a bantha calf. On the other side of the courtyard and through an arched entryway to the right of the kitchen, Beru led her to a row of industrial looking doors.

“This is the number two growing vault,” Beru announced, entering the key code that unlocked the second door.

On the other side of the door, the farm’s produce grew in hydroponic vats set in neat rows that filled the long room. There was a strong odor in the enclosed space, and when Mara asked, Beru pointed out the spent stink capsules that were set every night to discourage vermin.

They cut yellow stalks from a kassi plant and bundled them together to hang from the ceiling to dry. Beru showed her how to work white bulba roots out of the pans of soil and set her to brushing each root clean. Then they collected pallies and stored them in a large refrigeration unit in vault three, to keep them fresh until they were ready to be made into wine.

There was something absorbing about the repetitive tasks that Beru had assigned to her, and she found herself almost slipping into the same frame of mind that came with meditation or a workout, and that stillness of mind helped to pass the time. This was the work that Luke had grown up with, though she knew that he had always preferred fixing machines in his family’s garage to tending the hydroponic gardens.

As she carried a bundle of bulba roots to the kitchen she heard Owen and Luke’s voices coming from vault three, and when she returned Luke came into the second vault to whisper something to Beru. He peeked around the growing vats to look at her before Owen called him off again.

When she’d deemed the chores done for the day, Beru led Mara back into the kitchen, a long white room tucked behind the dining room, with counters and cabinets running along either side of the narrow space. The counters were cluttered with kitchen appliances, cooking implements, and a few small potted herbs. Beru cut the bulba roots into flimsi-thin slices and boiled them in a silver teapot. She poured out two cups, one for Mara and one for herself, and invited Mara to drink with her at the dining room table.

The tea had a rich, spicy flavor. Mara looked down at her nails and picked away the last bits of polish clinging next to the nail beds. She hadn’t minded the work, though she could imagine how mind-numbing it would grow after months and years.

Owen ducked his head in and asked about dinner.

“I’ll make ahrisa tonight,” Beru said.

“Do you need me to call Luke?” Owen asked.

“No, Mara can help me, won’t you, Mara?”

“Of course,” she said. “If you’ll show me what to do.”

She was set to chopping vegetables for a side dish while Beru mixed ground beans and spices and rolled the dough into balls and dropped them into the fryer. Luke had made the same dish for her, only a few weeks ago. He’d said that it wasn’t the same without some local Tatooine seasoning that wasn’t available fresh on Coruscant—she couldn’t remember the name of the spice, though she supposed she could ask Beru now if she really wanted the answer. 

Owen and Luke arrived as they set dinner out on the table. Owen sat down at the chair framed by the arch of the entryway, and Beru took a seat next to him, with Luke across from her, their places obviously established through years of habit. Mara sat next to Beru. 

She felt like an interloper, and the strained conversation at dinner did nothing to ease that impression. Beru and Owen seemed overly-conscious of her presence, though Luke didn’t appear to notice their discomfort. Beru asked her a few questions and Mara offered vague answers about her life and work as a smuggler. 

After dinner, Luke cleared the table and put the dishes in the washer, Owen wandered off, and Beru invited Mara to join her in the sitting room. Mara declined, telling Beru that she was still recovering from her stint in the desert and she planned to go straight to bed. She _was_ tired, but as she made her way down that hall that led to her bedroom she took a detour, slipping up the staircase that led to the domed entrance to the homestead. 

While following Beru around the homestead over the course of the day she’d gotten a better sense of the layout of the structure, but she hadn’t left the underground dwelling since she’d arrived unconscious the day before. Now she wanted a place to think, away from the confines of the homestead.

The door was locked, but there was a release button set in the side of the wall, and it was a simple task to disable the alarms and open the door to the outside desert. Lighting panels lined the curved arch of the doorway, illuminating the short flight of stairs that led to the surface.

The raised ring of earth to her left was the courtyard pit, and she could barely make out the spires of the vaporators dotting the property. The surrounding desert was washed in darkness, the only light the soft glimmer of the stars—stars brighter than any she’d ever seen before. On Coruscant the sky was almost always a glowing haze of reflected light, the only thing glittering in the sky were the lines of speeder traffic and ships cutting through the atmosphere.

If Luke hadn’t found her out in the desert she would have died, and her husband would have never found out what had happened to her. She wasn’t going to let that happen. She had to make her way back to her own time.

She just didn’t know how she was going to do that. Yet.

The obvious solution was to search out Obi-wan Kenobi, a Jedi Master of the old Order whose knowledge of the Force surpassed her own, which made him the most likely candidate to know why the Force had sent her here and now.

And there was something else—another reason Kenobi was on her mind that she hadn’t pinned down yet. She thought back over the last day and a half, to her conversation with Luke on Coruscant— _that’s it_ —Luke had mentioned an artifact he’d found in Kenobi’s possessions. Perhaps it was the key.

She lifted a hand and began to idly trace the symbols she’d seen on the artifact that had brought her here onto the wall of the domed building. She could only remember a small handful of the shapes that had run in a ring around the stone circle.

From Bestine she could make inquiries and find a way to scrape up enough credits, either to get off the planet or to rent a speeder to take her out to wherever Kenobi lived in that vast wasteland. It was a viable plan, but—she was hesitant to search him out. There were things she couldn’t hide from him, and she didn’t want to tear the fabric of time—or whatever—by giving him too many clues about the future. Besides, he was meant to stay here and guard over Luke until the time came for them to leave the planet and rescue Leia. He was woven into the timeline here in ways that she didn’t want to unravel.

It was a big galaxy, and there had to be someone else out there that knew enough about time travel to figure out how she’d managed to fall backward in time, and how to reverse the process and send her home.

Home.

She couldn’t imagine what Luke had thought when she’d blinked out of existence in front of him. It wasn’t the first time she’d done that to him, and he’d confessed that when she’d disappeared from the Force on Nirauan, his first impulse was to tear the entire garrison to the ground.

She prodded at the bond, trying to see if she could get some sense of what he was feeling, but nothing echoed back. Her fingers played against the tattoo on her wrist until she forced them to be still. She had to make it home to Luke, to the life they were just beginning to build for themselves, to a galaxy finally free of war, that bright future of which she’d only had a small taste.

If she didn’t make it home—no, that wasn’t an option; she wasn’t going to give all that up. She refused to let the galaxy take it all away from her just as happiness was within her grasp. She’d struggled for too long to lose it now.

If she didn’t make it home—she looked up at the sweep of stars above her head.

Vader was alive. Palpatine held the galaxy in his grip. She’d never been strong enough to face off with Vader, but… she thought she had a chance of taking out Palpatine. He might be the most powerful Sith who had ever lived, but _she knew_ the Imperial Palace, its security systems and secret passages intimately; she knew his routine, the ones he trusted to protect him and their weaknesses. She knew exactly where he would be and what he planned over the course of the next decade. She knew how and why other attempts had failed. 

She might— _might_ —have a chance. She had no illusions that she would survive such a mission.

If she could bring down the Empire a decade early it would spare millions of lives, saving Alderaan from destruction and sparing Luke the pain of facing his father and his torture at the Emperor’s hand. For that alone, it would be worth it to her.

 _She_ was out there too, a child even younger than Luke, just beginning her training as the Emperor’s pet assassin. What would happen to her if Palpatine died? She’d probably be killed in the ensuing chaos and riots, or thrown out and left to fend for herself. Mara didn’t think the odds of a small child surviving the overthrow of the regime that raised and sheltered her were high.

It was a sacrifice she was willing to make.

What did that mean for her, once the deed was done? Would she blink out of existence? Return to a future that had been completely altered by her actions, one that no longer had any room for her?

_It would be worth it._

“What are you looking at?”

She turned to see that Luke had followed her and was now hovering near the top of the stairs. He stepped out of the done to stand beside her.

“Is there a ship coming in?” His face tipped back, scanning the evening sky.

She eyed Luke warily. There was something bizarre—almost grotesque—about her presence here in Luke’s childhood, as though she were a voyeur witnessing something she wasn’t supposed to see. Not to mention the threat of influencing him in some way that might alter the future in ways she couldn’t begin to predict. It would be best for everyone if she kept her distance.

“No,” she said. “Just… looking at the stars.”

“Look, you can see the hunter,” he pointed up to a bright star a handspan above the horizon. “And there’s the great krayt dragon. When it gets later, you’ll be able to see the whole tail.”

She hummed an affirmative, watching him from the corner of her eyes. She could see all the features in his face that would mature into the man she loved, and it was weird seeing him like this—young and unfinished.

“Can you see your home planet up there?” he asked.

She looked up at the glittering expanse. “I’m not sure where it is,” she said. True in more ways than one.

“What planet are are you from?”

“I come from a planet called Coruscant—Imperial Center,” she corrected herself.

“Hmm,” he said, scanning the sky, and pointed. “I think it’s over there.”

It was so far away she couldn’t tell which of the sparkling stars were Coruscant’s sun.

“I’m going to be a pilot someday,” he said. “I’m going to see all those stars up close.”

“Luke?” Beru’s voice drifted up from the bowl of the courtyard below.

“Coming, Aunt Beru,” he called and skipped back down the steps again.

Before following him back into the homestead she tilted her head back to look up at the starry expanse one more, but there were no answers there.

 

— —

 

She had had a restless night, sleepless as she struggled to remember the plot of a holo in which a man had been cast back in time and returned a century after his family had died of old age. She couldn’t remember if he’d found a way to return to his original timeline, or if the timeline had been altered irreparably by his presence.

At one point, drifting on that edge of consciousness, she thought she could sense Luke beside her, laying on the other side of the bed. She rolled over and reached out for him, only to crash into wakefulness at the awful realization of where she actually was.

It had been a _day;_ she shouldn’t miss him this badly yet. They’d gone into the marriage knowing that their busy lives would mean long stretches of time spent apart, though neither of them would have imagined the distance between them now.  

Eventually she drifted off for a few hours, only to rise from the bed in the dead of night, putting one foot in front of the other until she found herself standing at the edge of the courtyard, with only the starlight shining down.

A woman stood in the center of the courtyard, long brown curls tumbling down her shoulders, her head bowed. She wore a dark pleated dress that bunched at her feet and over it, a long tunic with embroidered sleeves. The heavy tunic had an abstracted sunburst pattern embroidered on the front, with brightly-colored beaded ribbons hanging from where the design was bisected by the inverted wedge-cut of the tunic. 

As though she had sensed someone approach, the women turned and looked at Mara, and Mara felt a wave of sadness wash over her. As she watched, woman faded like mist at dawn, and in the space of a slow blink, the woman was gone. 

Not a ghost—more like a vision or a waking dream—though Mara wasn’t entirely sure she was awake. She didn’t remember the walk back to her bed, only her head hitting the pillow as the world faded around her.


	3. Day Three

It was still early when Mara woke, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep again, and it wasn’t so early that she would be the first person up. Luke had always been an early riser, and she knew it came from a lifetime of waking early on the farm and then to keep to a military schedule.

After her morning ablutions, she headed for the central courtyard, pausing in the doorway to look out into the open space. The suns hadn’t risen high enough to fill the sunken circle of the central courtyard, a shaded crescent filling the far end of the space on the other side of the moisture vaporator spires. Right on the edge of the shadow, in the pale morning light, Luke was seated on a stool, Beru standing behind him, running her fingers through his hair. Mara could hear the quiet rasp of a pair of scissors, and wisps of light hair fell away, drifting across the stone floor. Luke squirmed impatiently but stilled again at a murmur from his aunt.

Mara watched a single blond lock tumble across the courtyard on a draft of air. His hair would darken as he got older and spent less time in the sun. He still always let it grow too long before he had it cut.

When Beru finished she brushed him off, saying something quietly that Mara didn’t catch. Luke looked over and Beru followed his gaze, looking up to see Mara standing in the doorway.

“Good morning,” she called.

“Good morning,” Mara said.

“Mornin,’” Luke said, sliding off the stool. They watched him tear off into the wing of the homestead where Mara thought his room was located.

“I’m thinking of cutting mine too,” Beru said, reaching up to touch the bun at the nape of her neck. “Much easier to care for, and cooler too.”

She was turned away from Mara as she still looked in the direction where Luke had disappeared, cast halfway in shadow. She reminded Mara of her vision the night before of the mysterious woman in the moonlight and she felt her skin prickle.

Then Beru stepped out of the shadow into the light and crossed the courtyard to the kitchen. Mara followed her.

“I was hoping you could help me gather mushrooms this morning before the suns get too high and dry them out,” Beru said, picking up a basket and passing another to Mara.

Mara retrieved her hat before they left.

The mushrooms were unremarkable looking, small and brown. As she placed the fungi she’d gathered into the basket, Mara thought wistfully of Chandrillan sunset mushrooms, steamed and served on a bed of spiced rice. She was going to order an entire plate of them when she got back to Coruscant. And fish—she was going to order so much fish...

“Don’t eat any until I’ve cooked them,” Beru told her.

“Are they poisonous?” Mara asked as she gingerly plucked another from the base of the vaporator.  

“No, they just taste terrible until they’ve been seasoned.” Beru straightened, her eyes on the flat desert ahead of them.

“Noted.”

They moved on to the next moisture vaporator, heading further out from the farmstead. The suns were still low on the horizon and the air was warming steadily as they made their way across the salt flat. There was something unsettling about the flat, open expanse. Coruscant, with its jungle of cloudcutters, was her native habitat, and the desert left her feeling exposed in a way she found unnerving.

Luke probably found it comforting.

Beru probably did too. Mara glanced at her companion. It was hard to imagine herself in Beru’s position, marrying a moisture farmer and spending her days tending crops and gathering mushrooms. When she was younger, she might have had some vague notion that there were people who built their lives around farming, but she would have considered such a path beneath her.

“Did you expect to marry a moisture farmer when you were younger?” Mara asked. She couldn’t ever imagine herself choosing that life, let alone _longing_ for it.

“I was a moisture farmer before I met Owen,” Beru said. “I come from three generations of moisture farmers.” There was deep pride in those simple words.

“I don’t think I have the temperament for it,” Mara said.

Beru chuckled. “I suppose not everyone does. What _do_ you do, besides...”

“Smuggling?” Mara finished the thought. They still weren’t comfortable with her profession, but then, most people didn’t consider smuggling an honorable career, and there was nothing Mara could do about that. “I ran a legitimate trading business for a while as well. And I’ve done all sorts of odd jobs over the years.” She sensed that the answer hadn’t really satisfied Beru. “I used to be a dancer, too,” she added, though technically, her dancing had always been a cover for other assignments.

She felt a splash of pity mixed with distaste from the other woman, though Beru schooled her features into an expression of neutral interest. It took Mara a minute to remember what “dancer” might imply on Tatooine. She opened her mouth to refute that assumption and then closed it again. She had, in fact, been a Tatooine dancer once. She shrugged inwardly. It had only been a cover, and was, in fact, less distasteful than what she had actually been doing at the time.

“We’re not informers,” Beru said. There was something expectant in her voice. “You’re safe here.”

“Thank you,” Mara said.

“We wouldn’t turn your husband in.”

“...Thank you,” Mara said again, at a loss. Mara had never expected Beru to turn her over to Jabba or the Imperials for being a smuggler, and she wasn’t sure how to respond to the other woman’s assurances.

Both suns had climbed high into the sky by the time they reached the vaporator furthest from the homestead, and the mushrooms at its base were already shriveled and dry.

“Not that many,” Beru sighed as she looked into both baskets. “It’s been a dry season. We’ve heard that the water reserves in the larger settlements are running low. People will start dying when they run out. We’ll have to watch for water thieves.” She scanned the horizon again before she turned back toward the farm. “Owen doesn’t like it when I come out and gather mushrooms on my own.”

“Overprotective?” Mara asked.

Beru shook her head. “His stepmother was kidnapped by Tuskens. She didn’t survive.”

“I’m sorry,” Mara said.

His stepmother—Shmi Skywalker, Luke’s grandmother. Luke and Leia knew a little about Shmi from a diary that Leia had found on Tatooine years ago, and Luke had heard stories growing up. Mara hadn’t viewed the diary herself, but now she was curious about the other woman’s life here on the Lars farm.

“There haven’t been any reports of Tuskens in the area for over a year, but Owen always worries.”

Despite her reassurances, Beru still kept an eye on desert beyond the farm. There wasn’t a flicker of any approaching danger through the Force, and Mara didn’t see anything moving on the horizon, but she appreciated Beru’s watchfulness. You couldn’t be too careful.

“Did you meet Owen’s stepmother before she died?”

“Oh, yes. Owen and I hadn’t married yet, but I was living here on the homestead. I’d offered to stay to help out on the farm—we’re always in need of extra hands—but it was really to be close to Owen.” Beru smiled at the memory. “Shmi and Cliegg—Owen’s father and stepmother—put me up in the room you’re staying in.”

“What was she like?”

“She was a lovely woman,” Beru said. “Very gentle and generous. She’d been a slave before she married Owen’s father, you know.” It was clear she had had a deep affection for Shmi.

“She was never bitter about her life, even when she—” Beru cut herself off, started over. “She was very kind—she always very kind to me while Owen and I were courting.” Beru pointed back to a section of the desert framed between two vaporators that they’d already searched. “We held a small funeral there, just family: Owen and his father and Luke’s parents.”

 _Luke’s parents?_ She clenched her jaw to keep from gaping at the other woman, turning her head to look off into the distance and feigning only polite interest.

Beru and Owen had told Luke that he’d been born off-planet; that they’d never met his mother and that they’d never known her identity. Luke and always said that it had been difficult to coax any information out of them at all, and even some of the details, vague as they were, proved to be misdirection or white lies. Luke had been told that Anakin had left him on Tatooine without revealing the name of his mother, before returning to the ship he worked on as a navigator. The story of the dashing spacer who had died far away from his home planet had been a fantasy that he’d clung to and strove to emulate, long before he learned the truth.

It was one of the things he regretted not having the time to speak with his father about, and Anakin Skywalker’s ghost hadn’t reappeared since Endor. Mara wished he were here to ask Beru all the questions he never had answered. _She_ wanted to know too, a realization that took her by surprise.

“Were they killed by Tuskens too?”

“No,” Beru said. “Luke’s father was a navigator. He worked on a ship that ran a route between Corellia and Sullust, I believe. He died in a conflict during the Clone Wars. He and Owen weren’t very close.” There it was—the family lie, told so many times that Beru didn’t even hesitate.

“And Luke’s mother? What happened to her?”

“She died in childbirth,” Beru said. “Tragic. Luke’s father was lost about the same time. I hope they were together when she passed, but I’m not sure.”

“Was she from Tatooine too?”

“No, she told me that met Luke’s father here, when they were both young, but she was only visiting Tatooine at the time. They met again when he left the planet—to train as a navigator. I only met her briefly myself, before Luke was born. She was a beautiful woman; very kind and… charming, I think I would say. But strong-willed, too. I think Luke got his stubborn streak from her.” Beru smiled. “You could tell they were very much in love.”

Mara sensed that Beru didn’t usually speak so openly about Luke’s parents, but from Beru’s point of view, Mara was a stranger, and it meant little more to her than gossip to pass the time. She had no doubt that Beru was editing herself, as one would for a stranger’s ears, carefully omitting any names and keeping the details vague. She wondered how much of the story Beru really knew. It was hard to tell without asking questions that she shouldn’t know to ask.

“Luke was brought to us after his parents died. Luke’s father had been off-planet for years by then, and we’d lost track of him. There’s not much we can tell Luke. It’s just so sad that he’ll only know his parents through holos.”

Mara felt her brow furrow. What holos? There weren’t any holos. Luke didn’t even know what his mother had looked like. If Beru had holos of Luke’s parents, she’d hidden them where Luke had never found them.

“What was her name?” she asked.

Beru didn’t respond at first. She was scanning the horizon again.

“Her name was Padmé,” she finally said.

“That sounds like a Naboo name.”

Beru reached across and caught Mara’s arm, pulling her to a stop so that she could look Mara in the eye. “This stays between us, you understand?” There was a flinty look in Beru’s blue eyes, that Mara instantly warmed to; this was _exactly_ the woman she wanted watching over Luke.

“Of course,” Mara said.

“Luke’s parents were...troubled. We don’t want Luke to carry the weight of that. He’s still so young; when he’s older…”

 _Troubled_ was a more generous term than she would have used for the monster she’d known as a young woman. But it was true, too, as she knew Luke would remind her. True, from a certain point of view.

The grip on Mara’s arm gentled.

“Please don’t repeat any of this. I haven’t told him his mother died giving birth to him yet, and I don’t want him getting it in his head that he was responsible. You know how kids can be.”

Mara nodded. “He’s a good kid.”

“He’s such a sweet boy.” They began to walk again. “I always have to keep an eye on him whenever I take him with me to market. He’ll talk to _anyone_. He always wants to make friends with every single shopkeeper.”

Mara smiled at the image. “I believe it.”

“Do you have any children?” Beru asked.

“No.” Mara shook her head, and then clarified: “I don’t want children.”

“That may change,” Beru said.

Mara wasn’t able to hide her expression of disbelief, but Beru just seemed amused.

“Does your husband want children?” she asked.

They’d discussed it before they’d gotten married, of course. No, not discussed, she’d told him she didn’t want to have children, and he hadn’t pressed her. She’d told herself that there wasn’t anything else to discuss, but she knew differently, knew that Luke loved his family more than anything, and that he dreamed of sharing that love with children of his own.

She shrugged a shoulder. “My husband likes children. I just don’t...find them very interesting.” She liked the Solo kids, sure, and that she would put her life on the line for them had never been in question, but they didn’t make her long for children of her own.

“Hmm,” Beru said. “It’s a big decision.”   

She sounded unconvinced and Mara had to push down a flash of irritation at the other woman. Beru didn’t know anything about her, about what she’d been through—and she never would.

Mara’s anger abruptly drained away, replaced by a sadness that caught her by surprise. Some of it must have shown on her face, because Beru paused.

“Are you okay?” Beru asked. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No,” Mara admitted. “I...don’t remember my mother. I was taken away from my parents when I was very young and the man who raised me…” It was hard, even now, speak about the abuse and neglect—to name them aloud. It had been years before she’d even seen it as such, Palpatine’s control over her life so complete that she couldn’t comprehend the damage he’d done. “...He wasn’t much of a parent.”

She wondered if her inability to relate to Luke’s desire for children had to do with some deficiency in her own upbringing; a deficit of care that made her unable to connect with children with the ease that Luke had. She had never been loved the way Beru loved Luke, but Palpatine’s training had made her who she was, and she didn’t regret the person she’d become.

“I’m sorry,” Beru said.

“It’s fine. It was a long time ago.” Any link Mara had to her birth family was long dead, and Mara had no interest in hunting down the traces of whatever Palpatine had left behind, if he’d left anyone alive at all. Whatever she was, she was what she had made herself. She ended flatly: “He’s dead.”

Beru nodded. Mara felt a rush of gratitude that the other woman didn’t pry, though there was a part of her that wished she could spill the whole story. Beru deserved to know.

Beru deserved to know the things that Luke had done, and how much she loved the man he had become.

“My husband—” She had to be careful what she said, to obscure who he really was in her retelling—not unlike what Beru had just done for her. “He always sees the best in people… even if they don’t deserve it.” He could always see things beneath the surface and had pulled out the best in her, long before she had learned to value that part of his personality.

“We were friends for years, but being married—it’s different. It’s different than I expected. Having someone—that close.”

“Marriage is all about compromise,” Beru said knowingly.

She felt her irritation return. Like she hadn’t heard _that_ one before, from every single married person they knew. She was _trying_.

This wasn’t what she meant to say _at all._

“What I mean is—he never gives up hope.” The Empire already had invaded and destroyed settlements and cities at this point in its history, so she could tell the truth in a roundabout way. “His people were all killed, but he’s managed to rebuild what was lost. He’s been teaching—”

Beru caught her arm again, and Mara stopped. “That sort of talk is dangerous,” Beru said. “Best not to say anything more.”

Which was true, but— _what?_ What had she said that would give any clue that she was speaking about the Jedi Order?

“There’s Owen,” Beru said.

Owen waved from the top step of the domed entrance to the homestead, and as they approached he came out to meet them, kissing his wife and taking the baskets from both of them.

“I wish you wouldn’t go out there unarmed,” he grumbled.

“We were careful,” Beru put a hand on his arm as she stepped down the short flight of stairs. “And besides, Mara and I can take care out ourselves, can’t we, Mara?”

Beru smiled at her and she managed a half-smile in return.

She thought of her vision again as she followed them across the courtyard. The women in her vision had stood there—in the shadow of the large vaporator. The machine had looked exactly the same as it did now, as far as Mara could remember, giving her no clue as to _when_ the woman had stood there.

“Do you know who lived on the homestead before you moved in?” Mara asked Beru and Owen.

“My grandmother and grandfather built the homestead,” Owen said with pride in his voice. “My father made improvements—expanded the workshop and dug the third growing vault. He passed it on to us.”

“We’ve made a few improvements of our own,” Beru added proudly.

That...didn’t help her at all.

She had vague memories of seeing holos of the Lars family at some point, and she was sure the mystery woman hadn’t been Owen’s mother or grandmother. She didn’t think the woman was a Whitesun either.

Had she been a message?

A warning?  

 

— —

 

Over a breakfast of sauteed mushrooms, zucca bacon, and bantha milk, Luke cheerfully told them all about the lessons he was going to study that day. Mathematics was “kind of boring, but I’m pretty good at it;” he liked learning about all the planets in the Galactic Empire, and he was excited to get to the history unit on the Clone Wars, but “there are lots and lots of lessons on the Old Republic first.”

Mara remembered the Ministry of Education’s mandated lesson plans. She’d been given an accelerated version and had been instructed by private tutors, as opposed to the correspondence holos that the Ministry sent out to settlements on the Outer Rim like the farming community on Tatooine.

In retrospect, the driving purpose behind the Ministry-issued education packages was to mold future generations into good little Imperial citizens, and the history units were basically Imperial propaganda. They’d worked on her, up to a certain point.

“Are you going to stay with us?” Luke asked. “Like Kay and Neri?”

“Farmhands we hired last season,” Owen explained. “The harvest was better last year. We can’t afford to hire help this season.” The last remarked seemed pointed.

“I’m not staying,” she told Luke. “I’m just passing through. I’m helping your aunt to pay you back for rescuing me, and then I’m heading to Bestine.”

“Oh!” Luke said. “I like Bestine. Can I come too?”

“It depends,” Aunt Beru said. “Now eat your mushrooms.”

After breakfast, Mara offered to clean up and tidy the kitchen while Beru took Luke to the living room to set up the educational holos and help him with his lessons.

Owen was off doing farm—stuff. Mara honestly didn’t entirely understand how moisture farming—any farming—worked. Luke talked about it sometimes, but she never listened all that closely. She couldn’t imagine _knowing things_ about moisture farming; that way of life had been so far outside of her realm of knowledge and interest.

As she finished putting away the dishes, she let herself lean into the Force, stretching out her senses to pinpoint each of the individuals on the homestead. Beru and Luke were still in the living room, Owen was further off. She could sense the stretch of time before her—a half an hour, perhaps—when she could be certain she wouldn’t be disturbed. Cutting across the courtyard, she slipped up a flight of stairs that led to Owen and Beru’s bedroom.

All of the holos of the Lars family would burn with them. The only holos Luke had of his adopted parents were a few grainy copies from the collections of relatives and friends, sent to him years later. Mara had never even seen a picture of him as a baby.  

Owen and Beru’s bedroom was small and tidy. The ceiling was painted with the same bold, geometric patterns as the dining room, but in a ruddy ochre offset with a whitewashed background. There was a rug on the floor that looked similar to the rug in her room, comfortably worn with regular use.

Rifling through the drawers yielded nothing of interest, and she didn’t find what she was looking for on any of the shelves that held the couple’s personal items or at the small desk. Nothing in the clothing bins, either.

She scanned the wall, looking for vents that could be pried out and used to hide valuables, or— _Ah-ha._ She’d almost missed it in the shadow the desk cast into a corner of the room, but now the outline of a safe built directly in the wall was obvious when she looked at it directly.

The lock was almost laughably antiquated, requiring only a numbered sequence to open it, but even still, she couldn’t unlock it without the right equipment. Triggering the lock using the Force was delicate work that she wasn’t sure she was up to, and it required time that she didn’t have.

She exhaled, blowing out a frustrated breath. This whole search had been a wild guess anyway, and it was likely that the holos didn’t even exist. She still wanted to check the safe before she left, just for confirmation. It was possible that there was something in Owen’s workshop she could use to break into the safe. The back of her neck prickled a warning. She gave the room one last look, her gaze sweeping across the shelves to make sure that nothing was out of place before she left.

She’d made it halfway down the stairs, right to where the flight came to a landing and turned ninety degrees when she heard someone step out of one of the entrances below. She ducked back around the corner and watched from the shaded landing nook as Owen crossed the courtyard and disappeared down the hall that led to the growing vaults.

Backing up a few paces, she sat down on the last step before the landing. She wasn’t exactly eager to go back to work in the growing vaults, but from up here she had a clear view of the courtyard in case anyone came looking for her.

Her gaze drifted up the reddish walls of the courtyard to the pale blue expanse above. The twin suns were a set of white disks high in the sky, a sky devoid of even a wisp of a cloud. Her hand drifted back to her wrist. Luke’s two rings were golden, and she wondered if he thought of Tatooine’s suns when he looked at them.

Across the galaxy, Alderaan was a beacon of civilization for the galaxy, and its crown princess was still only a child. Somewhere on Corellia, Han was only a teenager, scraping by on the streets of Coronet City. Karrde was a young man beginning his life in the galaxy’s Fringe. If she was stuck here she’d find him. She smiled faintly, thinking how amused he would be if she became _his_ mentor in this timeline. He’d _love_ that.

If she was stuck—

She closed her eyes, letting loose a wish—a prayer—into the Force. _Let me go home._ She didn’t attempt to bargain with fate—she wasn’t that desperate. Yet.

She still hadn’t decided whether to seek out Kenobi. She just wanted to get as far from the Lars family as she could, in order to keep herself from kriffing up the timeline.

When she opened her eyes again, Luke was standing in front of her.

“What’re you doing?” he asked.

Mara shrugged. She was at a loss at how to interact with him; with how one interacted with children in general. It wasn’t as if she had had a normal childhood herself that she could call up to offer as a comparison. Even then, she hadn’t known any other children, not well enough to make friends. Her limited experience with the Solo kids hadn’t given her much to go on, and she had always been given the impression by their parents that the Solo kids weren’t typical children.

“Where’s your aunt?” she asked.

“She’s on a call,” Luke said. He leaned against the wall, his foot scraping back and forth across the floor. “She said it would take a long time. She takes _hours_ when she’s talking to Aunt Dama.”

The name Dama rang a few bells; Mara thought that Leia had spoken about her before. She knew that Luke had sent messages to his family that remained on Tatooine when they’d gotten married and he’d talked of going out and visiting them at some point, perhaps during the vaguely planned honeymoon they’d sketched out but had never taken.

“What’s your planet like?”

“It’s a city—the whole planet is a city. A bright light at the center of the universe.” It was something Luke had said once. “I live there with my husband.” She wrapped her right hand over her left wrist, the thumb brushing across the skin.

“What’s your husband’s name?” Luke asked.

She stared at him for a moment. Beru and Owen hadn’t asked, which now struck her as odd, and she had only thought at the time that she couldn’t give them Luke’s name. She hadn’t settled on the lie.

“Lando,” she finally said.

She caught him eyeing the tattoo etched on her arm and she silently pulled up her sleeve so that he could look at it.

“What does that mean?” He pointed to the circles.

She passed her thumb over the mark again. “It’s a tradition. When a couple gets married, they both get matching tattoos.”

“I’ve never heard that before,” Luke said. “Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru don’t have any tattoos.”

“Really.” If he’d made the slave tattoo story up, she was never going to let him live it down. “I’ll have to bring it up with my husband.”

He reached out and touched the tattoo. “I like it,” he said.

“I usually wear a holdout blaster there that covers it up,” she said.

“Really? Where is it?”

“Your Uncle put it in a locker for safekeeping.”

“Oh, that’s where they keep the slugthrowers,” Luke said. “I could open it for you.”

She blinked. “You could?”

“Yeah. I know the code,” he looked up, bright and eager. 

She did want her blaster back. “Alright, then.”

The locker was built into the side of the wall in a storage room on the other side of the growing vaults, with a coded locking mechanism that she could have easily broken into herself, with the right tools. Just like the bedroom safe. Luke had to drag a crate over in front of the locker so that he could reach the panel. She watched as he stabbed a finger at a keypad, punching out the code.

“Don’t tell Uncle Owen,” he whispered.

“I won’t,” she promised. It had been a simple numbered sequence and she wondered if Owen had programmed the same code into the other safe.

Her holdout blaster had been stored on a shelf inside the locker, below a rack that held the aforementioned slugthrowers.

Her lightsaber was tucked on the top shelf, above Luke’s line of sight. She itched to take it and strap it to her side, but she couldn’t risk him seeing it and asking questions before it was time for him to hear the answers. She could come back for it when she needed it, now that she knew the code.

“Where’d you buy it?” Luke asked as he watched her examine her holdout for any sign of tampering.

“I had it custom-made,” she said.

He looked impressed. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“You can.”

“Aunt Beru says she’ll teach me to shoot a slugthrower when I’m older.”

Slugthrowers could be effective but were difficult to handle; they were heavy and sloppy weapons compared to the efficiency of a blaster. Mara had never liked using them. Compared to a slugthrower, her small holdout blaster would be easy for a child to handle.

“I can show you how to handle a blaster,” she said.

“Really?”

“Not in the house,” she said.

“I know where we can go!”

They improvised a shooting range near a broken vaporator, far enough away from the homestead that the sound wouldn’t carry, Mara hoped. Everything was so _flat._ All Beru or Owen had to do was look in their direction. Luke dragged a metal cylinder across the sand that had once been a part of the vaporator, she thought, and propped it up as a target.

“This is the safety catch,” she told him, “right here by your finger as you take it in your hand; easy to flip if you’re drawing quickly. Always keep it pointed away from yourself.”  

She arranged his hands around the handle as he listened attentively. “Like this. Arms out, hold it steady.” She showed him how to stand and how to aim for his target, and then stepped behind him. “Take a breath, keep your eye on the target. Now: pull the trigger.”

His first shot went way too wide, and the second still missed by a considerable margin above the target. He made a short huffing noise and stomped his foot as he missed the target again.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It just takes practice. You’ll get better.”

One day he’d make a single shot that would devastate the Imperial Navy: “ _the best shot in galactic history,”_ it was said in certain histories and cheap holos.

He shot her a disbelieving look and she had to bite her lip to cover her amusement. Luke had always told her how impatient he’d been when he was younger, but sometimes it was hard for her to believe when faced with the great reserves of patience he’d always had for her and his students.

Of course, she  _had_ seen his impatience flare at times, though more notably when they’d been younger and not always on the same side of an issue, and in those situations he hadn’t been _that_ far removed from the boy in front of her.

Luke tried again, and made a pleased sound as his shot winged the target.

She heard the sound of speeder and turned to see an orange-trimmed land speeder crossing the sand flat at a steady clip toward the homestead. Luke followed her gaze. “That’s Silya,” he said, sounding disinterested, and turned back to the target.

“Silya?” she prompted.

“She lives over there.” He waved vaguely in the direction from which the speeder had come, not exactly answering her question.

Mara watched as the woman parked the speeder and ducked into the dome that led into the Lars homestead. Mara wondered if Beru would ask her neighbors if they’d seen a ship fall from the sky or heard anything about a man with Mara’s last name. Those questions wouldn’t get them anywhere, but Mara didn’t like the idea that her cover story could be called into question.

“I think that’s enough for today,” Mara said.

“Aww,” Luke said, dropping his arms. “Can we do it again tomorrow?”

“Maybe.” She didn’t want to make any promises. She held out her hand, and he reluctantly returned the holdout, which she tucked into a pocket of her skirt.

To her surprise, Silya was already leaving by the time she had coaxed Luke into ending blaster practice and heading back to the homestead. The other woman waved at Luke and then took off in her speeder, back the way she’d come.

Beru stood framed in the arch of the domed entryway, her arms crossed and a tense expression on her face.

“Is everything okay?” Mara asked.

Beru’s smile was tight and unconvincing. “Nothing you need to worry about,” she said. “Luke, your uncle needs your help in the growing vaults. Mara, can you help me in the kitchen?”

“Don’t tell Uncle Owen that I gave you the code,” Luke whispered to her as he darted off toward the vaults.

Beru set her to peeling and chopping. She worked her way through a pile of tubers, which let off a sharp smell when she cut into them and oozed a milky substance that stung her fingers, but not enough to complain about. The pile was large and kept her occupied until lunchtime—a meal of sliced fruit and flatbread smeared with a nut spread—and then the rest of the afternoon was spent scrubbing gardening equipment. When Beru headed out to the workshop to fetch Owen and Luke for dinner, Mara left the kitchen and crossed the courtyard on the premise of “washing up,” and took the stairs that led her up to Beru and Owen’s room.

She punched in the same sequence of numbers that she’d seen Luke use to open the weapons locker, and with the soft beep, the bedroom safe opened. Sloppy. She didn’t expect personal security concerns to be at the same level here on Tatooine as they were on Coruscant, but Owen should have known better, especially with Luke under the same roof.

The safe door slid open, revealing a set of unlabeled drawers. The top drawer held the family’s IDs, both the digital forms and registrations printed onto flimsi. The rest of the drawers were filled with neatly labeled datacards which appeared to be datawork on the farm—financial records, registrations, etc—not what she was looking for.

She knew she’d found what she was looking for the moment she saw it. It was an old datacube, nearly obsolete even in this era, stuffed in the back of the third drawer. Did they even have a compatible player? She glanced around the room again, and didn't see one. She was running out of time. She stuffed the datacube into the pocket of her skirt and made sure she’d put everything back in place before she left.

There was stew for dinner. Luke kept shooting her glances, especially when Beru asked about his day, but he didn’t say anything about their impromptu lessons. He was quieter than he’d been that morning, but still rattled off all the things he’d learned from his educational holos that day when Beru inquired.

After dinner had been cleared away, the family gathered in the living room. Beru offered Mara a datapad to read, which wasn’t connected to the holonet but had the last month’s news downloaded onto it, and Mara settled on the couch to flip through months-old reports from Imperial Center. The information might help her to better orient herself in this time period, but she found herself spending most of the evening watching the Lars family over the worn edge of the datapad.

Beru sat at a table with a pack of cards and began to play what looked like a game of smuggler’s solitaire. Probably not smuggler’s solitaire, Mara thought, remembering the Lars’s opinion of smugglers. Something similar, then. Owen and Luke set out a board game that she’d never seen before. The board was worn and was etched with lines and painted with abstract shapes. Small wooden playing pieces painted and carved into simple shapes were arranged across the board. They began to play, taking turns guiding the pieces by a set of rules she didn’t understand.  

“Aunt Beru, can you tell us a ghost story?” Luke twisted around in his chair to face his Aunt. He glanced over at Mara as if to make sure she was listening.

“You’re not going to be able to concentrate on the game if she does,” Owen warned. He moved a circular piece across a dull orange swirl and onto a grid etched into the wood.

Luke turned back to the board and his eyes narrowed in concentration as he focused on the layout. He moved two of his triangle pieces. “I win,” he said, and turned back to Beru.

“No, you haven’t,” Uncle Owen said. “The game isn’t finished yet.”

Luke twisted back around. _“You’re_ going to move the white king into the sandstorm,” he said, pointing. “And then I win with the krayt dragon.” He danced a red diamond across the board.

Owen stared down at the board. “But what if I move the white king into the mirage?”

Luke shrugged. “You _could,_ but you were _going_ to move him into the sandstorm.”

Owen frowned at Luke, and then cast a glance over at Beru. There was something tense and wary in his face, but he caught her watching him and scowled.

Beru chuckled. “He knows all your tricks, Owen.”

“Oh, go on,” Owen grumbled, sweeping the pieces into a pile and then scooping them into their box.

Luke swiveled back around, putting a leg on either side of the back of his chair and propping his chin on top. Beru smiled Luke and then looked over at Mara. “We have all sorts of ghosts on Tatooine that Mara’s probably never heard of before.” Mara shook her head, putting aside the datapad to listen now that Beru clearly intended to include her.

“Your Uncle Sam saw a mirage ghost out in the dune sea once,” Beru began as she slid the cards she was playing into a stack. The expression on Owen’s face cast some doubt on Uncle Sam’s reliability as a witness, but he didn’t say anything aloud. “It looked like his sister, Lianna. Mirage ghosts appear like lost loved ones and lure travelers away from their paths, until they die of thirst and are left to wander the desert as ghosts themselves.”

She thought of the ghostly woman she’d seen in the courtyard, with the sad expression and waterfall of curls tumbling down her back. Whose loved one had she been?

“Then there’s a type of spirit, called a scrubber, that haunts the wrecks of spaceships that have crashed in the desert. At night, they howl like krayt dragons and they eat little boys who try to climb the wrecks by sucking their souls right out of their eyes.”

Luke’s expression was one of pure delight. The desert had seemed barren and empty to Mara, but in Beru’s telling, it was a haunted world, thick with spirits.

“There’s a story about a ghost that haunted the tower on the edge of Mos Entha—”

Luke had lost patience with stories of mirage ghosts and scrubbers. “Can you tell us the one about the sarlacc ghosts?”

“Luke, it’s rude to interrupt your Aunt,” Owen said.

“Sorry, Aunt Beru.”

Beru smiled. “Yes, I can tell the story of the sarlacc ghosts. Do you know what a sarlacc is, Mara?”

“I’ve heard of them,” Mara said. She’d missed her chance to see a sarlacc up close, but in retrospect, she was at peace with that. "Large sand creatures who eat anything that falls into their mouths, is that right?" 

“Yes, that's right. They aren't just large, they're enormous, and it’s dark in the belly of a sarlacc, deep under the sand. When the people who fall in the mouth of the sarlacc die, their spirits wander around in the dark. When a spirit meets another spirit, they hold tight to each other. One by one, they form a chain, over a thousand years, until finally, the chain of ghosts can reach up to the surface again, their fingers just reaching through the top layer of sand. The ghosts at the top of the chain can slip free in the desert above and pull their friends up out of the sand.”

“That’s the only way you can get free of a sarlacc,” Luke chimed in.

“That’s right.”

Luke twisted around to look at Mara. “Do you believe in ghosts?” Luke asked her. “Uncle Owen doesn’t.”

“Yes,” she said. “Under certain circumstances.”

“I wish I could see ghosts,” Luke said, swinging his feet and kicking the legs of his chair. “If I met a ghost, I wouldn’t be afraid, I’d just talk to them.”

“That’s very polite of you, Luke,” Beru said. Luke grinned at her.

“But you should still be careful out in the desert,” Owen said. “Ghosts aren’t the only dangers out there.”

“Uh-huh,” Luke said, in the manner of someone who had heard _that_ one before. She saw Beru and Owen exchange a look. 

“Now,” Beru said, rising from her seat. “I think that's enough for tonight. It’s time for bed.”

 

— —

 

She waited until she was sure that Owen and Beru had both fallen asleep before she snuck out to Owen’s workshop. She hadn’t been allowed in this section of the homestead unattended yet. Another courtyard, open to the night sky, separated the workshop from the living area of the homestead, and a catwalk stretched over the sunken space, connecting the two. It was smaller than the central courtyard, and as she crossed the catwalk she could see that the courtyard pit below was filled with storage barrels and heaps of half-repaired equipment and worn parts. An old, gutted speeder sat against the far wall, and several moisture vaporators spires in various states of repair jutted up from the floor of the courtyard.

The workshop itself was a round room, with a bank of monitors and what smelled like an oil bath to the right of the door, and shelves and other equipment stacked along the other side of the room. Owen kept the space tidy, though there was a certain level of grubbiness that came with any well-used workshop. A grated circle in the center of the room was probably a lift that would allow Owen to move projects from the lower courtyard to his workshop.

It took an hour of sorting through the odds and ends before she found what she was looking for in the stacks of abandoned hardware. She wrinkled her nose as she held the machine up to the light. It was small, handheld holoprojector that probably predated the Clone Wars. It seemed to work, though, when she activated it, a small blue light blinking next to slot where the datacube could be fed into the machine.

She stretched out with the Force to make sure everyone in the homestead was still asleep before walking back across the catwalk, her footsteps echoing softly through the quiet courtyard below, the holoprojector cradled in her hands.

Back in her room, she crossed her legs as she sat on the bed, the datacube and projector lying on the comforter in front of her. It took a few minutes for her to figure out how to feed the datacube into the machine, and then a few more before she worked out the controls.

A holo materialized in the air above the projector. The projection was washed out, a fuzzy blue silhouette wavering above the player, and for a moment Mara was afraid that the datacube was damaged before she realized that the projector settings needed to be adjusted. It took a few minutes of fussing with the controls until the image came into focus.

It was a holo of a middle-aged man she didn’t recognize at first. She flicked the button to toggle through the image reel and the next image showed the man with a woman that must have been his wife. Owen’s parents, she realized. The woman would have been his mother who had died before Cliegg had married Shmi. She had been listed on the ancestry chart that Luke had shown Mara shortly before they had married. Her name had been Aika. Cliegg had left Tatooine to marry a Core world bride, and had returned home with Owen when his wife had died. She wondered what Akia thought of marrying a moisture farmer from a far-flung Rim world. They seemed happy in the holos. There were a few more images of the couple in what looked like a city apartment, and then two of a young Owen about the homestead.

She recognized the woman in the next holo, dark-haired and smiling shyly at the holo recorder before she shaded her face against the sunlight with a hand and turned away. It was Shmi Skywalker. The holos had also been clearly taken on the homestead—Owen’s father with Shmi, Shmi in the kitchen with Owen, Shmi standing alone watching the twin suns set. She did look kind, as Beru had said. She looked happy with her new family. 

The next set of holos were all Beru’s relatives. She recognized a few of them from Luke’s holo collection, though they were much younger here. Luke would recognize all of them, no doubt, though they didn’t mean anything to Mara, who flipped to the next set of holos.

Her fingers stuttered on the controls as Anakin Skywalker’s face appeared, smiling out at her. His hair was cropped short, a padawan’s braid dangling over his shoulder and brushing against the layered Jedi robes he wore. Anakin Skywalker as a _padawan._ It was hard to imagine. This was Luke’s father. This was also the young man who would become Darth Vader, who had wiped out the Jedi Order and killed and tortured hundreds with his own hands, including his own children. He looked so _young._ He had _dimples._

The holo must have been taken right at the beginning of the Clone Wars, or soon after. Palpatine’s campaign to wipe any records of the Jedi from the Imperial archive and the holonet had been effective, but a few holos had been recovered over the last decade. Several propaganda holos that included the Jedi commanders who fought in the Clone Wars had surfaced, including a few that featured Anakin and Obi-Wan Kenobi. None of them showed Anakin outside of his military command—as relaxed and _smiling._ None of them had shown him so young.

The next holo had clearly been clipped from one of those propaganda holos, though it wasn’t one that Mara had seen before. The quality of the copy was poor, and Anakin appeared at a distance. She moved on.

In the following holo he stood by a young woman who wore a silver patterned cloak, the hood pulled up to cover her head. Her back was turned, but as the short loop played out, she turned and looked straight at out at the holorecorder. 

Mara sucked in a breath as the woman’s face appeared. It was the woman from her vision the night before.

Mara knew who she was. _Amidala._ She had been a minor martyr of the early Rebellion, and her speeches and policies had helped build the foundation of the New Republic. Mara remembered her full name now: Padmé Amidala Naberrie. Padmé. This was Luke and Leia’s mother.

Minutes passed as she stared at the holo, and then at the next, in which Anakin and Padmé were caught unawares in conversation together, Padmé wearing an elaborate gown and headdress, and Anakin looking down fondly at her.

After that, a holo of Padmé on her own. She was caught mid-sentence, and she laughed and smiled at the holorecorder. Like Anakin, she seemed unexpectedly young and carefree to Mara. Younger than Mara was, and more carefree than she’d ever been.

The next set of holos showed Beru with Luke as an infant, then as a baby. There were many of these, following Luke as he grew. She smiled back at the holo of the toddler beaming up at the holorecorder. She replayed the reel and then replayed it again, lingering over the holos of Luke as a baby and as a small child.

Someone—Beru, Mara was sure of it—had saved these holos of Luke’s parents, hidden them, planning to tell him one day, to show him his parents, no matter how dangerous that might be. And then they would be incinerated by the firebomb that had destroyed the Lars homestead.

Mara knew how much Luke would treasure these holos. Even learning his mother’s identity would be a gift, and she knew how much peace it would bring him to finally have that mystery solved.

It had been under their noses the entire time.

Leia would _love_ that her mother had been Padmé Amidala, hero of the old Republic and a founding member of the Rebellion. She looked like Leia—or rather, Leia looked like her—small, with bright eyes and a charismatic bearing that leapt out of the holos. Leia had never been as interested as Luke in revealing the people her birth parents had been before the Empire had risen, but Mara thought that she’d appreciate the holos as well.

The ancestry chart, with its thick tangle of lines that traced Luke’s Lars and Whitesun relatives and generations of Organas, had remained blank where the matrilineal line connected to Anakin Skywalker. An empty space. If she could return home and give Luke his mother’s name it would mean the world to him.

Then perhaps the _days_ of waiting around the Lars homestead—picking pallies and pika and chopping _kriffing_ bulba roots—would have been worth it.

If she hadn’t utterly karked up the timeline, that is.


	4. Day Four

A hand on his shoulder jerked Luke back into awareness, out of the deep meditative state that had taken his mind far away from his body. For a few seconds, he wasn’t sure where he was. He lifted his head, his neck stiff and cracking a little, and blinked stupidly up into Han’s face.

“Han,” he croaked and rubbed a hand across his mouth.

Han’s face was folded into lines of concern as he straightened, his hand slipping away from Luke’s shoulder. “C’mon,” he said, helping Luke to his feet, holding him steady on legs that wobbled from being folded up for hours on end.

“How long have you been under?”

“I don’t know.” He glanced around the living room, but there wasn’t a chrono in sight. Han followed his gaze. He’d pushed all the furniture to the edges of the room, leaving a wide open space with the artifact lying dead center in the middle of the floor, a few feet away from where they stood.

It didn’t look entirely sane, he knew, and he knew that Han wouldn’t be happy to learn that he’d spent the entire day sitting in front of it, swimming the Force as he searched for Mara.

“Kid,” Han sighed. “When was the last time you ate?”

There was a pause as he tried to think back. “Um.”

Han sighed and spun toward the kitchen, and Luke heard him curse as he tripped over the bins that still cluttered the dining room. He wandered in to find Han pulling open a frozen meal pack with his teeth and putting it in the cooker.

“Don’t have any _real_ food in here,” Han grumbled to himself.

When the cooker dinged, Han plucked out the pack and a grabbed a fork, and then caught Luke by the arm and pulled him out of the kitchen. He dismissed the dining room table, heaped with odds and ends, and maneuvered Luke back into the living room and onto the couch, placing the meal pack in his hands. He dragged a chair across the room, giving the artifact a wide berth, and stopped the chair a few feet from Luke’s knees before sitting down and looking at the meal package pointedly.

“When you’re done eating you’re going to take a shower,” Han said, pointing a finger at him.

Luke began to eat under Han’s stare, mechanically lifting the fork to his mouth and letting his mind drift back over the last four days.

He’d been in shock when Mara first disappeared. Sinking deep into the Force, he’d spread his consciousness out in search of her, calling and calling into the void. An hour passed without a hint of her, and then another, and then he’d lost track of time.

Nothing had worked. Wherever she had gone, Mara was out of reach.

When he came back to himself he’d let loose what had amounted to a psychic howl, a desperate, angry cry in the vain hope she might answer, which had echoed through the head of every Jedi on the planet. It was a selfish, self-absorbed display of temper, but by that point, he could barely think over his panic. Even now, there was a panicky feeling that bubbled up in his chest and it took all of his training to keep it from spiraling out of control.

Leia had come around and yelled at him about it after she’d picked him up off the floor. She listened patiently, as she always had, as he’d paced back and forth across the room while telling her how Mara had disappeared. Leia had calmed him down enough to get him to eat (as Han was doing now) and sleep, reasoning that he could try again with a clearer head once he’d had some rest.

Having a clearer head hadn’t helped resolve the mystery of where Mara had gone, and he still couldn’t figure out what had happened beyond the fact that the artifact she’d touched had triggered some sort of Force-powered event that put her beyond his reach. The Force gave him no clue as to where she had gone.

He reached out to his bond with Mara again. He was doing that constantly now, like the compulsive need to wiggle a tooth even though you already knew it was loose in your mouth.

She didn’t respond. All he could tell from the strained link was that she wasn’t dead, and she wasn’t mortally wounded or otherwise fading from life. She was just… distant. So unbearably distant.

“Have you been able to sleep?” Han asked.

“A little,” he admitted. It would have been more accurate to say that the little sleep he was getting came when he collapsed from exhaustion or whenever Leia stopped by to bully him back into bed.  

When he’d finally fallen asleep he’d dreamed of Tatooine.

In his mind, he’d gone back home again, to the homestead of his childhood. Everything was just as he remembered it—the white and red clay walls, the worn yet familiar furniture, the spires of the moisture vaporators jutting into the clear blue sky—except that the entire homestead was empty, abandoned, and deathly quiet. In dream-time it felt like hours had passed as he wandered through deserted rooms, methodically searching for some clue that would tell him where everyone had gone.

It was a reoccurring dream that he often had whenever he was under a lot of stress. Nothing much ever happened in the dream; he didn’t dream of Owen and Beru’s death, or of the homestead burning under the Tatooine suns. He was simply haunted by the sense that something was missing. Sometimes it would build into an intense feeling of anxiety, and he’d search the homestead frantically, racing through empty rooms, though he never found whatever he was looking for.

This time was different. When he’d reached the kitchen, his aunt had been standing at the counter, leaning over a mixing bowl. She turned when he entered, looking annoyed. “Have you found her?”

“Who?” he’d asked.

“Your mother,” dream Beru said. “She’s waiting for you in the courtyard.”

He turned and ran back into the courtyard. Suddenly he was a small child again, alive with the anticipation of seeing someone he’d never met, knowing that she was just around a corner that he hadn’t yet turned.

He hated the disconcerting feeling that rushed through him whenever he woke up from one of those dreams. The world fell back into place again—a world in which he could never go back to his childhood home again.

“I slept a little,” he repeated. He took another bite of the meal pack.

“Good,” Han said, still watching him intently. “I have to say, Kid, I’m glad it was her that disappeared instead of you.”  

His head shot up, and he felt his upper lip curl in what amounted to a snarl, but Han continued.

“If it were _you_ that had disappeared, I’d probably be over here helping her hide a body.”

It took a second for the joke to sink in. “She wouldn’t actually _kill_ anyone, Han.”

“You sure?”

Luke laughed. It was a hoarse, breathless laugh, but it was a laugh nonetheless. It was the sort of joke he deserved for marrying a former assassin—only he’d been looking forward to having years—decades—of bad jokes from Han about their relationship.

“I’m not coping well, Han.” He put the meal pack aside and scrubbed his hands across his face. “I know I have responsibilities; I’m due back on Yavin next week—”

“Don’t worry about that. Leia will comm Tionne and work something out. Finding out what happened to Mara is more important. They’ll manage things until you figure this out.”

Behind his hands, he nodded.

“Luke,” Han said, and his heart lurched at Han’s gentle tone. “Have you thought about the possibility that she might not come back?”

“No.” He dropped his hands, fixing Han with a stare he knew, from Han’s expression, was unsettlingly intense. “Absolutely not. I’ll find her, Han, somehow—I’ll find her.”

“Do you have any ideas how?”

“I’m not sure… the Aing-Tii are said to have time-manipulation techniques… or—there’s a place on Ruusan, that’s supposed to be a powerful nexus of the Force, but…” He had datapads full of notes on places where there had been reports of strange Force-related incidents, but none of them seemed like likely candidates. He’d have to go through his notes again to see if there was anything he’d missed on Jedi who had disappeared off the face of the galaxy.

Han was staring at him pointedly, an eyebrow raised, and he realized he’d trailed off in the middle of a sentence.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I’ll find something.”

Han placed a hand on his shoulder. “I believe you, kid.”

“I can’t lose her. We just found each other.” They’d wasted _ten years_ before they’d realized what they could have together. “I mean—you know what I mean.” He twisted his left wrist upward and let the tip of his finger trace across the two intertwined golden circles.

“I know,” Han said, and was quiet for a moment, just letting Luke breathe, and then said, “you know, wherever she is, Mara’s doing everything she can to get back to you, too. I’m sure she’s giving whatever took her away hell.”

Luke smiled, though it was a painful thing, that slipped away when he thought of Mara fighting alone.

“Meanwhile,” Han continued, “I don’t want to have to face Mara when she gets back if you waste away waiting for her.”

Luke managed another half-smile. “I’ll wash my hair.”

“Good.”

 

— —

 

Mara had never been so bored in her life.

This was how this would all end: after days picking and drying and chopping kassi and lamta and tangaroots, scrubbing water tanks and sweeping sand, checking the moisture levels in the vaporators again and _again,_ she would crack and wander off into the desert to die in the past.

She understood now, in a way she never had before, why Luke had felt a desperate need to leave the planet, to escape the long days repeating the same routine over and over. When she saw him again— _if_ she made it back—she was going to tell him that she completely understood why he couldn’t wait to leave this dustball. She was glad he hadn’t stayed on the farm, or felt a need to return to it. She would have made a terrible moisture farmer’s wife.

“Not today,” was all Beru would tell her as to why their plans to drop her at Bestine had been delayed. She could feel ripples of tension vibrating off of Owen and Beru, and she had the sense that it didn’t have to do with her, though she was surprised that they hadn’t hurried to get her out of their lives.

“I can’t take you to Bestine today,” Beru said. She looked over at Owen. “I have to run over to the Darklighter farm.”

“Can I come?” Luke asked.

“No, you need to finish your history unit today. I won’t be all day. When you’re done studying, Owen will need your help bundling the podpoppers to sell in Bestine.”

Luke grumbled. Owen and Breu had a conversation she didn’t bother to follow about borrowing some sort of fungicide from the Darklighters to combat a blight that was infecting the bloddle crop. Farm stuff.

Beru took off soon after breakfast. Luke slunk back to his room to work on his lesson, and Owen went out to check on a vaporator that looked like it might be malfunctioning. Mara spent a few hours stripping the remaining bloddles of their husks before she decided that she’d had enough.

 _Fierfek,_ farming was _boring._

When she slipped out of the vaults to take a water break, she didn’t go back. She crossed the courtyard, passing a cleaning droid chugging determinedly across the yard, and then made her way through the cool passageways that led out to Owen’s workshop.

In the pit of the second courtyard she found a broken E2-5 unit covered in a layer of fine sand. She drug it over to a workbench that sat in the shade of the wall and found a toolbox wedged under the speeder. She unscrewed the access panel and took a look inside. From the look of the gears and the shorted out wires, the droid was simply wearing down with age, but she knew a few tricks to reroute the burned-out processors and Owen had the parts she needed in his workshop.

Machine repair was tedious in its own way, but it was work that was familiar to her, and had an achievable goal at the end. Even if the droid was far beyond its factory setting, she could at least get it working again. She let her mind drift as she took the droid apart and spread the pieces across the workbench.

She’d had another vision last night. This time Padmé Amidala had been standing outside the homestead, near the lip of pit that dropped down to the courtyard, silhouetted against the suns setting on the horizon in a smear of pink and purple. She wore a dress that fell to her feet and brushed the ground, the light blue fabric wrapped in heavy layers around her shoulders and draped like a cloak across her back. An elaborate silver headband that wrapped over the crown of her head and looped around a mass of curls pinned above each ear, the rest loosely tied together at the back of her neck. Her dress and hair could have come straight out of a romantic holo set in the Old Republic.

She’d been looking out toward the sunset but she turned as Mara approached, a welcoming smile spreading across her face. Mara almost turned to see who she was looking at before realizing that the other woman was smiling at her. Padmé held out a hand and Mara flinched, stumbling backward. Padmé couldn’t be here for _her,_ she remembered thinking—she would mean nothing to Luke and Leia’s mother, who had died before she had been born. Padmé Amidala didn’t even know she existed. She was in the wrong time again. She didn’t belong in Padmé’s Tatooine.

The vision had slipped away and Mara found herself back in her bed, her heart pounding. It had taken a while to calm down and go back to sleep; she kept trying to reach across the bond and somehow _make_ Luke hear her across the distance of decades and light years. At night, alone in the dark, she missed him more than ever.

She was stripping a pair of wires when she heard someone come into the yard, but she didn’t look up until Luke—not _her_ Luke—was standing by her side.

“Aren’t you supposed to be doing your lessons?” she asked.

“What are you doing with Eetwo?”

She frowned at him. “Did you finish your lessons?”

“Nooo,” he said. He pulled a crate over so that he could sit beside her.

“Beru said you have to finish your lessons first.”

He shifted closer. “This more interesting. Besides, it’s more useful for me to learn how to do this stuff so I can help Uncle Owen around the farm.” He said it with the air of someone trying to get his own way in an argument through an unassailable feat of logic.

He probably shouldn’t be spending so much time around her, but she wasn’t sure what to say to him to make him leave her alone. Han would probably know what to tell him; Han would get a kick out of the entire situation, no doubt. She went back to twisting wires together, half hoping that he’d grow bored and wander off, but she should have known better. He just scooted closer to watch as she twisted the wires together. 

It was easy—easier than she expected—to let him sit beside her, watching her raptly as she worked and occasionally asking questions and handing her tools. The core of Luke’s presence in the Force, burning brightly inside this child, was soothing and familiar, even without the layers and shades that Luke would gain as he matured, and without the bond that linked him to her.

But when he looked up at her, she saw Luke’s eyes—his smile— 

“Luke, what are you—?”

She glanced up to see Owen standing in the doorway that led back into the living quarters.

“I’m helping Mara fix Eetwo,” Luke said.

Owen crossed the courtyard and stood beside the bench, looking over her workstation. She ignored him for the most part, her arm deep inside the droid as she tried to loosen a particularly stubborn bolt. After a moment of watching her work, he disappeared up the stairs that led to the workshop and returned a few minutes later, holding a ratchet wrench which looked exactly the right size.

“This should work better,” he said.

“Thanks.” She got the bolt free and tugged loose the panel that held the processor she needed to access.

Neither Luke nor Owen seemed to have any intention of leaving her alone to work. Luke continued to ask questions, and Owen observed silently, handing her tools without her even having to ask. Eventually, she began to narrate the process, explaining the repairs she was doing as she went along, slowly putting the droid back together, piece by piece. In an almost comically similar movement, they both leaned forward at exactly the same time to watch her switch on the reassembled droid.

“Wiring the two processors together should make it work.” She flipped on the droid and made a satisfied sound as the Eetwo chugged to life. “A smuggler by the name of Dankin taught me that.”

“That’s clever,” Owen said with a half-smile.

She turned the droid off. “You’ll need to run a diagnostic before you put it back to work.”

Owen nodded. “We can do that in the workshop.”

They heard Beru calling from within the living quarters, back from her visit to the Darklighter’s farm. Mara hadn’t realized how much time had passed as she worked in the pit.

Owen’s face closed off, though it softened a bit when he looked down at Luke. “Better get back to your lessons before your Aunt catches you out here,” he said, nudging Luke with his elbow.

“She said she’s bringing back maki beans for dinner,” Luke said, wrinkling his nose and making a face.

Mara found herself sharing an amused look with Owen.

“Maki bean soup is gross.”

“Now there—don’t say that to your Aunt,” Owen said. “She’s a good cook.”

“I _know,”_ Luke rolled his eyes.

“She’s a good farmer,” Owen continued, though Mara suspected that the comment was more for her ears than for Luke. She had the impression that Owen considered this the highest compliment he could give. “This farm wouldn’t be what it is today without her.”

“Okay, okay,” Luke said, wiggling off the bench.

“Thanks for fixing the droid,” Owen said to her.

“Don’t mention it,” she said. “I’ll just clean up here first.”

He nodded, and then followed Luke back into the living quarters, leaving her alone to tidy up the droid parts and tools spread out over the bench.

 

— —

 

The afternoon sun cast long shadows across the courtyard by the time she finished up and headed to the fresher to wash her hands and face. Beru would probably need her help preparing dinner. She idly stretched her senses out through the homestead to pinpoint Beru before she headed in that direction—and was brought up short, sucking in a breath at the nasty snarl of emotion emanating from Beru and Owen.

It didn’t have the combative flavor of a fight, but she could sense that Owen was angry, deeply angry, and beneath that anger, she could sense a well of fear fueling his outrage. Directed at her.

Something had happened. Perhaps Beru had learned something over at the Darklighters—though what that might have been, she didn’t know. Beru had obviously spoken with Owen first, instead of asking her.

They would come looking for her sooner or later, so she might as well confront them now. She sensed that they’d moved into the living room, so she took the flight of stairs that led down to the lower levels.

Beru and Owen were having a discussion in low tones when she stepped into the living room. Owen turned, his expression darkening further as she approached. Beru stood quietly at his side, her arms crossed, watching with an air of tense anticipation.

Owen spoke first. “The blaster we found on you is missing from the locker. Did you take it out?”

 _Kriff._ So that was what this was about. She’d forgotten to put it back. She’d left it in her room, meaning to sneak back to the locker when Beru wasn’t around, but she’d been preoccupied with breaking into the locker in their bedroom to steal the holos and then into the workshop to find a holoprojector and then she’d… forgotten about it. Sloppy and stupid of her. Only three days of mind-numbing farm chores and she was already getting complacent.

“Yes, I did,” she said. “It’s _my_ blaster.”

“How did you get get the code?”

She’d promised Luek she wouldn’t tell.

“I’m a _smuggler._ I know how to bypass a simple key code.”

“So you broke into _our_ property and took out a weapon—”

“It’s not Mara’s fault! I asked her to!”

They all turned as Luke stepped into the living room.

“What did you say, Luke?” Owen asked. He was clearly surprised by the interruption.

Luke straightened, his chin going up. “I opened the locker. I asked her to teach me how to shoot a blaster. I—I know Aunt Beru is going to teach me how to shoot a slugthrower someday, I know! But I wanted to try the blaster. We don’t have one.”

Her heart squeezed at his defense of her. He wasn’t at fault and he could have stayed away and spared himself—he _should_ have stayed away and let her take the brunt of Owen’s anger.

“You _know_ you’re not supposed to get into the weapons locker,” Owen growled. “Or give out private codes to a _stranger.”_

Luke flinched a little under Owen’s glare. Despite his anger, she could tell that Owen would never lay a hand on Luke, but a child as Force-sensitive as Luke was would certainly feel Owen’s fury churning through the Force, though he wouldn’t know what he was sensing or understand that it was fueled by fears that had nothing to do with what Luke had done.

“We just spent a half an hour practicing with my holdout,” Mara said. “That’s it. We came right back afterwards, and he hasn’t touched it since. It’s been in my room the entire time.”

Owen’s glare slipped in her direction, and he said, “Luke, go to your room.”

“But Uncle Owen—”

“Listen to your Uncle,” Beru said. “We’ll discuss your punishment later.”

Luke threw Mara one last look before he slunk away, a desperate expression of hopelessness and pity.

“I didn’t mean anything by teaching him how to handle a blaster—” she began.

Owen turned to her, his face twisted in anger. “We rescue you, let you into our home, and you give our boy a blaster!” he hissed.

Her brows snapped down, her stance automatically shifting into a defensive position. “He’s perfectly capable of handling a blaster and he wasn’t in any danger. You’re overreacting.”

“We don’t even know who you are or what you’re doing here! How are we supposed to trust you? You say you’re a smuggler but you don’t have a ship! You have a _slave tattoo_. Did you think we wouldn’t figure out that we had a runaway slave under our roof? If your master comes poking around looking for you or your husband—”

Suddenly the veiled comments Beru had been making about not turning in her husband made a lot more sense. Beru always steered her away from certain topics, but she’d thought it was some sort of odd farmer reticence. They hadn’t even asked his name. She’d completely misunderstood them.

“I’m not a slave,” she snarled at him. “I’ve never been—” She cut herself off. It was true that she’d never officially been registered as a slave, but her servitude to the Emperor had been, in some ways, a form of slavery. She couldn’t even _begin_ to explain her early life to them.

“My husband was freeborn on Tatooine,” she said, slowly and emphatically. “His father was a freed slave. He choose our marriage tattoos to honor his father. We aren’t running from anyone.”

He would go on to take down Jabba, free his father, and help liberate the entire galaxy. Neither of them would live to see it.

“I’m going to find my way back to him.” All the words get caught in her throat in a terrible, painful knot. She wanted to go back to Luke, back to her _life,_ the life she was _meant_ to live. “He—his—”

“No, don’t—” Owen raised a hand to stop her. “I don’t want to hear any details. I don’t want names. I don’t want to _know_ anything.”

“There isn’t anything to tell! I’m not here to incite a slave rebellion, or whatever _you_ seem to think I’m doing.”

It didn’t even occur to her until the words were out of her mouth that she should try to placate Owen instead of arguing with him. Apologise. Try to make peace. Be a better Jedi. _Shavit, shavit, shavit._

She looked to Beru, but the other woman’s stance was entirely closed off, her silence a tacit support of Owen’s tirade. Mara searched for a flicker of reassurance and found none. It felt like a betrayal.

“If you’re not a slave, then what are you doing here? How do we know you’re not here to rob us blind?” She had the impression, from the short time that she met him, that Owen wasn’t much for words, and tearing into her may have been the most he’d spoken in a month. “Or—or how do I know you’re not a spy sent by Jabba to poison our wells?”

She felt her brows draw together in confusion, taken aback by this line of attack. “Why would I poison your wells? Why would _Jabba_ poison your wells? The farms provide him his water—”

She felt something like fear slide through them, and she concentrated on it, letting her mind sift through what she’d observed over the last few days. What it told her was shocking.

“You haven’t been paying the water tithe,” she said flatly.

She was right. They both flinched at the statement, exchanging frightened, guilty glances.

“That’s none of your business,” Beru said, her voice quiet but harsh.  

She felt her own anger rise. “Provoking Jabba is a _death sentence_ on Tatooine,” she said.

The farm hadn’t been razed to the ground in her universe by Jabba’s people, but maybe her presence in the timeline had altered things enough that she couldn’t be sure of their safety. She couldn’t know anything for certain.

“Enough,” Owen said. “I don’t want you under my roof anymore.”  

“Are you throwing me out?”

“You’re leaving tomorrow. Beru will drop you off in Bestine and you’re not coming back here.”

“Great,” she snapped. “That’s what I’ve been asking you people to do all along!”

“Fine,” Owen said.

“It’s settled,” Beru said. “Mara, the blaster—”

“You can have the kriffing blaster until I leave,” she said, spinning on her heel before they could say another word. She stalked back to her room, retrieved the blaster and returned to the living room. Glaring in their direction, she smacked the blaster down on a table and stormed out again.

There wasn’t anywhere for her to go except for the small guest room, and locking herself in to stew over the confrontation with Owen and Beru felt immature and petulant, but she didn’t think she was welcome anywhere else on the homestead anymore.

This was all her fault. She didn’t think it through when Luke asked her to teach him to shoot, and now she’d shattered any goodwill she’d built up. Owen wasn’t a man who trusted easily, and she couldn’t gain that trust again by offering him the truth. She’d begun to think of Beru as a friend, but it was obvious that in any argument, Beru would stand with her husband against Mara. It shouldn’t have stung, but it still did. Now that it was clear that any sort of relationship to the Lars family was closed to her, she felt like she’d been suckerpunched.  

She smacked the wall with her palm. _“Kriff.”_

There was a quiet tapping at her door. She hit the release button and the door slid open to reveal Luke standing in the hallway. He glanced warily back the way he’d come, as though he expected Beru or Owen to come around the corner any second. They were still back in the dining room, Mara sensed.

“I’m sorry Uncle Owen yelled at you,” Luke said. He scuffed his foot against the floor, his eyes darting about.

“It’s alright,” she said. “I shouldn’t have taught you to shoot without asking Owen or Beru first.”

Her hands itched to reach down and tousle his hair as she’d seen Owen do, but she kept them at her sides. He wasn’t _her_ Luke, and _kriff,_ she missed _him._

“Thank you for showing me, anyway,” he said, a conspiratorial grin creeping across his face. “That was wicked.”

She bit back her own smile. “You should probably get back to your room before your Aunt and Uncle catch you.”

He nodded, a little bob of his head, and spun around to head back down the hallway. “‘Night, Mara,” he called in a whisper.

He was happy. He was loved, and the farm was a world still big enough for him.

He hadn’t reached the age when Tatooine would begin to seem too limiting and provincial, the boundaries of this life too constraining. The Luke _she_ knew defined himself by having left Tatooine; he came from the desert and from a farm, and he left that world behind to become a Jedi and fight for the galaxy.

Her farmboy. She brushed her fingers over the tattoo on her wrist. If _her_ Luke were here, he would tell her to—he’d tell her trust the Force, and to meditate on the conflict she’d had with Owen and Beru.

She exhaled, letting her anger disperse into the Force, acknowledging her pain and recognizing that it had deep roots in her psyche that had nothing to do with the Owen and Beru’s intentions. She’d—she’d work on that. She sat on the bed and crossed her legs, put her hands on her thighs and slipped into the Force.

She came out of the meditation when she sensed a presence moving down the hallway. Beru. She stopped at Mara’s door and then tapped once, and left down the hall again. Mara went to the door and found a covered plate on the floor just outside her room. It was a serving of vegetable curry, with flatbread on the side.

It was a clear message that she wasn’t welcome to join them at dinner. A sour feeling that had nothing to do with the food swirled in her stomach. She ate the curry and waited until Owen and Beru had moved on to the living room before she slipped to the kitchen to return the dishes so that she wouldn’t encounter anyone.

The hard edge of her anger had dissipated during meditation, but the hurt still throbbed in her chest. She’d screwed everything up. She’d let herself hope that she could have _some_ sort of relationship with Beru and Owen, only to be reminded that she didn’t belong here.

She was leaving tomorrow, anyway.

Bestine first. In Bestine, she could figure out how to buy or steal a ship and get the kriff off this sandtrap. From there, she’d head out to the Kathol Rift, she decided, and ask the Aing-Tii monks for help. Karrde had told her that they had unusual ways of using the Force to manipulate space-time, and she needed an unconventional solution to get her home.  

Bestine first. Then she’d figure out what came next.

 

— —

 

When she came down for breakfast, Obi-Wan Kenobi was sitting at the table.


	5. Day Five

“Mara, this is Ben Kenobi,” Beru said. “He lives out in the Jundland wastes.”

There were still traces of the handsome man he’d been in the old Clone War-era holos she’d seen, his face weathered into hawkish angles and his hair beginning to go a wispy white. She had the impression of a deep weariness that hung over him like a heavy cloak, though he hid it behind a welcoming smile. A smile that said _I’m just a harmless old sage, stopping by to exchange pleasantries with old friends._

_Shavit._

“Ah, Mara. Beru told me a little about you. She said that they found you in the desert.”

“That’s right,” she said. She kept her voice and expression neutral as she took a seat at the table opposite him.

“So nice to meet new people,” he said, smiling at Beru.

Beru nodded pleasantly at Kenobi, passing him a cup of water. Mara had expected a frosty reception from Beru after what had happened the prior evening, but it seemed as though Beru was making nice in front of Kenobi, in spite of the fact that Mara could tell she wasn’t happy about his presence at her table either. There was a stiffness to her friendly demeanor that Mara had never seen before. Under the surface, Beru was humming with tension, the thread of fear from the night before winding through her. 

Owen’s absence was probably deliberate as well. She wasn’t sure where Kenobi stood there, but recalled that Luke had mentioned once that he hadn’t been allowed much contact with the Jedi before his guardians’ death.

“I stopped by to offer a few black melons I harvested on my wanderings.” Kenobi gestured to the small pile of fruit heaped on the table. The melons were about the size of his hand, with blackened and cracked outer rinds.

“It’s very kind of you,” Beru said. “Though I don’t know what I’m going to do with them.”

“Black melon milk is a very good source of nutrition, although I’m afraid they don’t taste very good.”

“That will make it hard to convince Luke and Owen to eat them,” Beru said. “But I can give it a try.”

There was no way this _friendly visit_ was a coincidence. Kenobi must have been monitoring the Lars farm closely. Luke was the strongest Force-sensitive on the planet, and there was no one else like him on Tatooine until she arrived. She must have been like a beacon.

Kenobi turned to her. “May I speak with you privately, for a moment, Madame? Perhaps outside?”

Mara glanced at Beru. The other woman was appeared unsurprised by Kenobi's offer, her expression giving nothing away. 

“Sure," Mara said. 

He didn’t mean the courtyard. She followed him, bemused, as he led her across the courtyard pit and through the homestead. As they headed up the narrow corridor that led to the above ground dome, he began to speak, turning his body slightly in her direction.

“Beru tells me that you have a Tatooine slave tattoo.” His tone was one of friendly curiosity, but Mara knew this was an interrogation. “But from the slaveholds Northeast of here—Mos Espa, perhaps.” 

She twitched her wrist, curling it towards her body. “It doesn’t hold that meaning where I come from,” she said.

“Beru says that Owen is convinced that you are a runaway slave. They might be inclined to help a single slave running from an abusive master, but they think that you want to steal your husband from your master and that sort of business could bring trouble to the farm.”

So she’d gathered last night. “They don’t have to worry about that. I’m not a slave, and neither is my husband.”

“You were not a slave, but you have familial ties to Tatooine,” he said, the statement a question.  

“Something like that,” she said.

He took a sharp right and walked around to the far side of the dome. She followed.

“I can—” before she’d said another word, she felt herself lifted and flung a foot backwards against the dome, a significant amount of Force pressure pinning her back against the wall.

His lightsaber hilt, unlit, pointed at her throat.

“You know what this is and what it can do.” His voice was still calm, though it held an edge missing from his earlier impression of a jovial old man.

“Kriff,” she gasped.

“Who are you? Who sent you?”

“It’s a mistake. I’m here by mistake.” She wasn’t sure she could lie to Obi Wan without the Jedi Master being able to sense the deception. “I’m not a threat. Not to you or to Luke. I’m—I’m from the future. I traveled back in time from the future.”

“Time travel? Why, that sounds like cheap holo.”

“Yeah,” she huffed. “I _know._ But it’s true. I can’t tell you anything about your future, but I—I know things. I know that you’re Obi-Wan Kenobi, one of the few Jedi who survived Order 66. Your apprentice, Anakin Skywalker, fell to the dark side and under the sway of Emperor Palpatine. You hid his two children, his daughter on Alderaan and his son on Tatooine, and you’ve been living here, watching over Luke since he was born. He only knows you as Ben, a hermit who lives out in the desert. He doesn’t know his heritage—and I didn’t tell him, _or_ Owen and Beru. I’ve no intention of interfering.”

His face remained hard, and she wondered if telling him what she knew had been the right move. She wasn’t sure what else she could say that didn’t reveal what was going to come in the next decade or so.

“I have proof. I brought my lightsaber with me from the future.”

 _“Your_ lightsaber?” To her surprise, he pulled her lightsaber from his robes and held it up. “Beru gave it to me. We were wondering how you managed to steal it from my home.”

 _“Look_ at it,” she said, pointing at it with her chin. “Through the Force.”

She felt him focus on the lightsaber, his psychometry technique more confident and skilled than the clumsy way she’s probed the artifact that had sent her here. He would be able to feel that the lightsaber had been hers—it had hung at her side and cut through her enemies—for the last ten years. Every lightsaber’s kyber crystal carried traces of those who had wielded it, their presences lingering longer than on any other personal object.

“How curious,” he said, his voice soft. “It is the same lightsaber.”

“Yes. You’re planning to give it to Luke when he’s older. Later—much later—it was—it _will_   _be_ given to me.”

She felt the pressure ease, enough for her to straighten and take a step away from the dome, though she still could feel the loose grip of it around her. Kenobi stepped back a pace as well, his hands folded in front of him.

“If I may—” 

“Yes,” she cut him off. “Take a look.”

There was something polite—chivalrous, she might say—about the way he brushed against the edges of her mind, testing the depth of her sincerity. She kept her shields partially open, only closing doors that would offer him clues that would tell him too much about his future. She wrapped herself tightly around her bond to Luke and traces of the link that had once bound her to Palpatine. 

“A Jedi from the future,” he said, as if testing that concept aloud. “How far in the future?”

She wondered if he could sense that she was not a traditionally trained Jedi; that she had never had the strict structured training of a Jedi of the old Order. That might be a good thing. She assumed it would be better to keep him guessing about the nature of the new Jedi order.

“I don’t know if I should tell you that.”

He studied her face, and nodded. “You know what will happen in _my_ future, but you don’t want to affect the course of events by revealing what will come.”

“Yes. That’s exactly it.” 

Kenobi opened his mouth again and then seemed to reconsider and closed it again. He studied her for a moment, before starting again. “You realize that your presence alone is proof that the Jedi order survives the Emperor in some fashion.”

“I _did_ try to avoid you,” she said. She knew she sounded more sullen than she intended but she couldn’t bring herself to care. “Yes, the Jedi Order survives—not the way you remember it, but it _survives._ Luke survives. He told me about you—he tells all the Jedi about you. I know you intend for him to face Vader and the Emperor but I can’t tell you how that plays out. It doesn’t go down that way you think it will. I can’t tell you any more than that.”

He was quiet for a moment, and then said, with a touch of humor in his voice, “our plans never go the way we intend them to go, do they?”

She snorted. “No, they don’t.” Her plans to head for Bestine were a wash now, for starters. 

She hadn’t wanted to involve Kenobi at all. Avoiding him was a way of protecting him, and by extension, Luke, from whatever damage she might be doing to the timeline. _Protect the timeline,_ those tacky holos always insisted. If you interfered with established events as you knew them, the whole timeline could unravel. She didn’t think the Force would facilitate such a disaster, but here she was, and now that he was involved—she might as well ask.  

“Now that you’re here—I think you can help me.”

“Help you?” Kenobi asked. “How?”

“I was sent back in time by some sort of Jedi artifact. I don’t know why it sent me here, to Tatooine, or _how,_ but when I touched it, the artifact triggered the—time slip, or whatever it was. My—Luke Skywalker told me you had an artifact like it. The artifact that brought me here was about this big—” She made a circle with her hands, and then bent down and sketched the disk in the sand, tracing the runes as best as she could remember them. “There was a hole in the center and symbols that ran along the edge.”

She looked up again to see Kenobi shaking his head. “I don’t have anything like that,” he said. “Although…” he studied her clumsy sketch and pointed to a few of the runes. “I do have a small artifact with those markings on it, though it isn’t shaped like a circle.”

“That must be it,” Mara said. Perhaps it was the other half of a bridge that had brought her here, to this particular planet.

Kenobi looked doubtful. “I’ve never sensed anything special about it,” he said.

“The artifact Skywalker had didn’t seem special either, until I touched it with the Force.”

He nodded. “You’re welcome to take a look at it, if you think it might help you.”

“Thank you,” she said. If it could help her get home to Luke, then perhaps it was worth involving Kenobi.

“It would probably be for the best if you left the Lars homestead regardless,” he went on.

“I’ve been _trying_ to—driving me over to Bestine hasn’t been on the top of their priorities.” No matter how much they distrusted her and wanted her off the farm, they’d been distracted by other, more pressing matters. Now that she knew that they weren’t paying the water tithe, she had a good idea as to what those concerns were.

“If the artifact I have is no use to you, I can take you to Bestine myself if you so desire.”

“Thank you,” Mara said. “I don’t want to be in the way, or mess up the timeline, or whatever.”

“Indeed,” Kenobi said. “Beru is probably wondering what happened to us.” 

No doubt they would be happy that Kenobi was taking her off their hands, Mara thought as she followed him back into the homestead.

Beru and Owen were standing under the arch of the dining room, having a tense conversation that broke off when they approached. Owen stiffened when he saw her and Kenobi together.  She still wasn’t sure how much Owen and Beru knew about Luke’s parents, his father specifically, but whatever they knew hadn’t left them with any fond feelings for Kenobi.

“Mara and I have talked,” Kenobi told them. “I’ve agreed to take her to Bestine so that you won’t be inconvenienced by the trip.”

Owen’s eyes darted between them. “Good,” he said shortly. The air seemed charged with his hostility, but for once it wasn’t directed at her.

“I want my holdout back,” she said.

Owen didn’t speak, and he didn’t meet her eye when he returned with her blaster in hand and placed it on the table before he disappeared again into the growing vaults.

Beru insisted that she take the clothes, skin cream, other necessities that had been loaned to her. If the artifact that Kenobi owned could send her home, then Mara wasn’t planning to be on Tatooine for much longer, but Beru didn’t know that, and the other woman seemed to think it was important that Mara leave the homestead with more than just the clothes on her back. Mara chalked it up to some sort of stricture of Tatooine hospitality.

She packed the things that Beru had given her in a small satchel along with her Coruscant blouse and jacket, slipping the data cube of family holos in an inner pocket of the jacket. There was no way she was leaving it behind to burn in the raid.

She changed back into the dark pants and boots that she’d arrived in, worn with a loaned button-up shirt in dark blue linen with tiny red triangles flecked across the fabric. Her holdout blaster was once again in its familiar place on her left wrist, concealing her tattoo. She missed the weight of her lightsaber (or even a blaster) at her hip, but Kenobi still had it in his possession. She’d ask for it back when they left the homestead.

Last of all, she grabbed the large floppy hat Beru had given her and placed it on her head.

Mara hadn’t seen Luke all morning and she wondered what Owen or Beru had said to keep him away. Maybe he’d been confined to his room as punishment for the night before. There was part of her that wished she could have said goodbye to him—seen him one last time—but it was probably better this way. She would slip out of his life again without leaving any traces that might cause unforeseen consequences in the future.

Kenobi’s voice carried across the courtyard as she crossed to the dining room one last time. “—take the melons. I know they don’t seem like much, but things are likely to get worse.”

“I know,” Beru said. “The water levels—”

But Mara never heard what Beru thought of the water levels, because she broke off when she saw Mara in the doorway. She turned and reached back into the kitchen for a parcel that she handed Kenobi. “For the journey.”

Kenobi thanked her for the parcel and made his farewells.

Mara looked across the short space of the dining room to Beru, who stood in the entryway to the kitchen, her hands folded and mouth tight. She didn’t want to leave without saying something. That knot of frustration snarled in her chest again; frustration at having messed up her one chance with Luke’s family.

“I’m sorry—I’m sorry for the trouble last night. I didn’t mean to put Luke in any danger.” _I’ll always protect him,_ she wanted to say. _I swear it. For the rest of my life, the universe will have to go through me to get to him._ “Thank you, and thank Owen and Luke for finding me in the desert.”

Beru nodded. “Good luck.” It wasn’t entirely unfriendly, but it didn’t have the same warmth that Beru had shown toward her the day they’d searched for mushrooms together.

There wasn’t anything else she could say. She followed Kenobi out of the homestead again, up into the bright desert.

The last time Kenobi had led her out of the homestead she hadn’t noticed the eopie crouched on the other side of the dome. It lifted its head, unfurling its snout as Kenobi approached.  

“This is Neda,” Kenobi said, patting the eopie’s side. The creature turned its long head and made a hooting noise at Kenobi, who chuckled.

Mara wasn’t sure they would both fit on the eopie’s back, but Kenobi assured her that they were hearty animals, used to carrying heavy loads long distances across dry land. He adjusted the animal’s saddle and mounted with the ease that came with years of practice. She climbed on behind him—not quite as gracefully—and he chivvied the beast to its feet.

The beast began to plod slowly away from the farmstead. “Once she gets moving she’ll pick up a good rhythm,” Kenobi said. “But I’m afraid it will still be a long journey.”

Neda’s pace did pick up as she loped steadily across the sand that stretched to the horizon. They were headed Northwest, away from the Great Chott salt flat and toward the Jundland Wastes, where the arid land grew rocky. The suns were well into the sky, and sweat began to trickle down her back where the sunlight beat down on her.

She was glad for her hat.

Every planet—every place in the galaxy—had its own distinct signature in the Force, much like people did, and that signature was shaped by the living beings that inhabited that world. Tatooine felt different from Coruscant, and different again from Yavin; it had its own distinct texture, one of great open expanses where meager sparks of life struggled for survival.

There was a quiet rhythm to the desert, the feeling of cycles playing out over and over under the twin suns. It was distinctly different from the ever-present, constant churn and chatter of Coruscant, where millions of beings were packed together, playing out their own private dramas.

It was something she hadn’t been consciously aware of before becoming a Jedi, and most of the time it was just a background hum, but here, in the still stretch of the desert, she couldn’t help but notice the distinct texture of the planet’s presence in the Force.

“I know that Tatooine seems harsh and unforgiving,” Kenobi said, sounding almost apologetic about the planet. “It can be quite a shock when one has spent their life in more civilized places.”

He wasn’t wrong, though this wasn’t her first time on-planet.

“I’ve been to Tatooine before,” she said. “Once. Although I didn’t see much of the planet. I was sent on an undercover mission to Jabba’s.”

“The Hutt still holds Tatooine in his grip?”

She supposed it wouldn’t hurt to reveal a little of the future he’d never live to see.

“No, now—then—” _Kreth,_ time travel was irritating. “In _my_ time, Jabba was killed by—insurgents. He’s been dead for decades. I was younger—then.”

Kenobi nodded. “That’s good to hear.”

Once again, she was reminded that she was the wrong person to have slipped back in time and been given the chance to meet the people that Luke longed to see again. He would have known what to say; knowing him, he would have never let up asking Kenobi all about the old Order.

She still had to tread carefully, as carefully as she’d done with Beru and Owen, if not moreso. Admitting how little she knew about the Jedi Order would tip him off that there had been no survivors past a certain point in time. _Every_ conversation she’d had on this _blasted_ planet had been constrained by what she couldn’t say and what she couldn’t ask.

Screw it. Luke would ask.

“Can you tell me what the Jedi Order was like before the Empire? We have records and I’ve talked to people who remember the Order, but—Palpatine was good at obscuring the truth.”

“He wiped out all but the faintest traces of our people,” Kenobi said. Seated behind him, she couldn’t see his face, but there was no mistaking his grief.

He began to speak, slowly at first, as though reminding himself of the story that he hadn’t told in years. He told her of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, home to all the Jedi in the galaxy, where they could study and meditate on the ways of Force and raise Force-sensitive children to be peaceful guardians of the galaxy, as they had for the last thousand years. It sounded idyllic in Kenobi’s nostalgia-hued telling. It was hard for Mara to imagine.

The terrain grew rockier, and the path the eopie took began to wind steadily upwards into the highlands of the Wastes. When the path leveled out at the top of the plateau area that was bordered by mountains and canyons to the north, and the Dune Sea to the south, they stopped for lunch, unpacking the simple meal that Beru had prepared to sustain them on their journey.

From the highlands they could see the Western Dune Sea stretching toward the horizon. A small herd of wild banthas moved slowly across the far-off dunes, the wind rippling through their heavy fur. “Friends of mine,” Kenobi said. She couldn’t tell if he was joking.

He concluded his story over lunch, sketching out his role in the Clone Wars as General who commanded troops into battle in an increasingly brutal conflict mired in incomprehensible political warmongering. 

She mentioned having seen holos.

“Propaganda,” he scoffed, waving a hand dismissively.

She didn’t say that the holos had been suppressed during the Empire—it was likely he already knew—and were still hard to find. Nor did she mention that Luke had poured over every recovered holo, looking for footage of Kenobi and his father.

Kenobi spoke about Anakin Skywalker with a fondness that surprised her, almost as if Anakin was a different man than the one who would become Vader. In Kenobi's telling, he had been a brave and kind man, if somewhat reckless in battle. He didn’t speculate on what had caused Vader’s downfall. He never mentioned Padmé’s name once. It was probably another measure to protect Luke, and she couldn’t blame him for that.

“...Palpatine—Darth Sidious—had been using the dark side to poison the Force, and none of us could see it… until it was too late.”

For her it was all history, immutable and distant by the time she understood the scope of what had happened. The genocide of the Jedi was taught in schools now—in her time—in New Republic approved education holos sent out to Rim worlds like Tatooine.

His telling of the end of the war and Order 66 was brief and suffused with lingering pain. “Feeling my brothers and sisters blink out of life, all over the galaxy… I hope to never experience anything like that again.”

He fell silent, lost in his memories. She watched as an avian swooped out of the sky, diving down to capture some unseen prey. The only sound was the hiss of the wind rearranging the sand. 

”You get used to the quiet,” he said, his gaze on the desert. Not just the quiet of the desert—the quiet in his head. The emptiness, where a thousand Jedi had once echoed through his consciousness. 

There was another thing she had to ask—this was her only chance.

“Did you know any Jedi by the name of Jade?” She had doubts that _Jade_ was the name given to her at birth, but it was all she had to go on.

He was quiet for a moment, stroking his beard, and then shook his head. “No, I never heard of any Jedi by that name.”

It only confirmed what she had suspected: that her parents, whoever they had been, hadn’t been part of the Jedi order. If her records were accurate she had been born a few years after the purge, anyway.  Another dead end.

“They may have left the Order before I became a Master. If they were relatives—”

“I never knew who they were. The Empire stole that, too.”

They’d both lost their families to Palpatine’s thirst for destruction and power. Mara had been too young at the time to comprehend the loss, and afterward too devoted to the Palpatine and the memory of the Empire to give her birth family much thought.

She’d given up on ever finding her parents. There was simply no trail left to follow. She’d long suspected that either Palpatine had her family killed after kidnapping her, or they’d given her up willingly. If the latter was true, she didn’t want anything to do with anyone who handed over a child to the Emperor.

They were only shadows; a  blank space in the ancestry chart opposite the web of myriad lines—the Lars and Whitesun and Organa branches—of Luke’s family. 

“Many of the children at the Jedi Temple were orphans or came from families that couldn’t care for a Force-sensitive child. The Jedi became their family.” He paused for a few moments before continuing. “They weren’t encouraged to wonder—or worry—about their birth families.”

Never having known her parents didn’t compare to the loss that Kenobi carried with him, having lived through the genocide of his people and the destruction of his entire way of life. 

“Anakin Skywalker and I grew up in the temple together, you know. I thought I knew him better than anyone in the galaxy, but I never understood how he could betray and murder the Jedi—we were his family…”

It wasn’t the same at all.  

Restoring the Jedi was Luke’s dream, his life’s work—reclaiming a place in the world for people like him. People like her.

Kenobi was quiet again, staring out over the Dune Sea. When he spoke, his voice was soft. “I sometimes wonder if… all our efforts were in vain. If all that I have done… if it isn’t enough.”

She knew that she couldn’t comprehend the patience and faith it must have taken to live out this exile, year after year, away from the fight and from everyone and everything he had known. Alone. He wouldn’t live long enough to see the Jedi return.

“I am heartened to learn that the Jedi have survived… in some form. Not all hope is lost.”

“I can’t tell you what happens.”

He had no idea of what was to come—that he would lead Luke out of Tatooine and onto the path that would bring down the Empire.

“I know,” he said, shooting her an archly amused glance. “I wouldn’t presume to ask.”

 

— —

 

The day had slipped into the afternoon hours when Neda finally climbed up a rocky trail deep in the mountains that led to a rough pourstone house standing alone on a bluff that overlooked the Jundland Wastes. It was a small square building, topped with a dome. A single vaporator spire stood alongside the structure and beside it a shaded post and trough where Kenobi hitched the eopie.

She followed him across the threshold into the hut where he had made his home since the Republic had fallen. There was a cramped living area on the other side of the door. Luke would probably call it cosy. She couldn’t imagine spending nearly two decades in this hovel. 

“You’re welcome to stay if you like—if you want to rest before you travel back to your time.”

The trip across the desert wastes, under the beating sun, had been exhausting, but Mara knew that she wouldn’t be able to relax so close to her goal.

“No, thank you.” _I want to go home,_ she thought. “I’d better go before I cause any problems in this timeline.”

Light streamed through the windows set into the thick walls along the right side of the house, onto the small dining table and chair where Kenobi took his meals. Another round plastoid table sat before a chair and couch on the other side of the room. The floor, the chair, and the couch tucked into an arched alcove were all covered with animal furs. It was clear that the couch doubled for his bed. Personal items were tucked into shelves sunk into the walls, and artifacts and primitive sculptures were displayed on a large shelf in the corner between the couch and the door. A few steps on the far side of the room lead to a raised level where she assumed the kitchen and refresher were located. What looked like Tusken weaponry hung on the kitchen walls. 

Kenobi stooped over a chest tucked in a corner by the door and pulled out a lightsaber—Anakin’s lightsaber. He held her lightsaber in his other hand and looked down at the two matching blades.

“It isn’t that I didn’t believe you,” he said. “But holding the proof in my hands…”

The silver cylinders were almost identical, save for a few tiny imperfections that she doubted that anyone would notice but her. Anakin’s hilt still had the scuffed fourth strip on the hilt’s grip that she’d replaced several years ago, and hers had a tiny dent next to the activation switch.

“You still need to give Luke his father’s lightsaber when he’s ready,” Mara said. “You’ll know when it’s time.”

“I believe I will,” Kenobi said. He gave her back her lightsaber and returned Anakin’s to the chest. She put her lightsaber back where it belonged, hanging from a clip on her belt.

“When the day comes to give him the lightsaber, I will tell Luke the truth about his father and his legacy—”

“That’s a lie.” The words were out of her mouth before she’d thought them through. _Kreth._

Kenobi was clearly taken aback at her accusation, and she stumbled through her explanation. Lying to Beru and Owen had been easier than the half-truths she fed Kenobi. 

“You—you’re not going to tell him. He isn’t ready—he _won’t_ be ready.” 

Force, _who would ever_ be prepared for _that_ revelation?

“Don’t tell him. Just—do what needs to be done to protect him.” She knew that Luke had been conflicted about his relationship with the Jedi Master, no matter how much he loved him, but from where Mara was standing, Kenobi had done what had been needed to keep Luke away from Vader.

There was a short, awkward silence, and then Kenobi gestured to the couch that was set into an alcove of the main room. “Please sit.”

As she waited on the couch, he stepped up into the kitchen and returned with two cups of tea. “To refresh us, after our journey.”

Mara didn’t want _tea,_ but she took the cup.

“Now, this is the artifact that I think you were looking for.” He crossed to a shelf in the corner and passed her one of the objects that had been on display in his collection. The artifact was smaller than the disk that had brought her here, and shaped like an obelisk, the runes running up and down the narrow column of stone. “I thought it was just an interesting relic. I never guessed that it held any power.”  

She turned the obelisk over in her hands. “The runes are the same. It’s a match.” 

He wasn’t wrong—the rough stone object didn’t appear to be anything special, though there had been no indication that the stone disk she had activated on Coruscant had had the power to send her back in time, either. Not until she focused on it through the Force—

She glanced around his small home. “Maybe I should do this outside…”

“Ah, I know just the place.” 

A short walk further up the slope from Kenobi’s house led to a small sandy plateau that overlooked the desert. Kenobi’s hut had been built so that the cliffs sheltered it from the winds that whipped up from the west and south, but this rocky shelf was exposed to elements, a hot breeze brushing against her face as she looked south across the wastes. 

Kenobi stopped at the edge of the plateau. “Goodbye, Mara Jade. Travel safe.” 

“Thanks. Thank you for—for everything.” He’d done more for the Jedi than he knew.

As she walked across the plateau the wind caught at the edges of her jacket and whipped tendrils of hair around her face. When she reached the center of the plateau she stopped and stood still, looking out across the desert. 

She let her breathing deepen and reached out to feel the flow of the Force around her, let it pour into her. Lifting her hand, she held the obelisk before her, feeling the weight of it in her hand and the shape of its presence in the Force. She lifted her fingers to brush across the runes etched into the surface of the artifact. There was that feeling again, like a crackle of electricity under her fingertips. She focused on that surge of power.

The obelisk rose out of her hand as though it were lighter than air. She felt the Force thrumming around her, her fingertips tingling as the artifact hovered above them. Once again, there was a sound that she felt more than heard, like the murmur of distant voices or the vibrations of a song played through a faulty headset. The obelisk gave out a flash of heat that rippled through the air.

_Home. I’m going home._

A whisper of misgiving shivered over her like tiny tremors in the earth—

Something wasn’t quite right—her concentration slipped, only for a second—

The obelisk shattered.

A great crack ran through the stone and it fell out of the air, dropping to the sand in pieces.

She felt the shock rush through her body; knew that her jaw hung slack and her eyes were wide as she stared at the shattered obelisk.

It was gone. Her best chance at going home—shattered.

She sensed Kenobi approach. “Mara—” He reached a hand toward her shoulder and she stepped back, out of his reach.

“No. No, no…” She fell to her knees, scrabbling around in the sand for the pieces of the artifact. She held up a large fragment, staring blankly at the broken shard. She let it fall from her fingers.

“Mara,” he tried again.

“If you say a word about this being the will of the Force,” she said. “I’ll run you through with my lightsaber, future be damned.”

She staggered to her feet and walked blindly away, away from Kenobi and the shattered artifact, away from her failure.

She wandered down into the canyons below Kenobi’s hut, aimlessly drifting through the wastes. When anger overtook her, she fired her blaster into the canyon wall until the powerpack failed and her arms were stiff, leaving a large blackened scar in the ancient stone wall.

This fucking planet wouldn’t let her go.

It was dark when she traced her way back to Kenobi’s hut. He wasn’t in the main room or the kitchen when she stumbled through the door. She had the sense that he was trying to give her space, and she was grateful for the gesture. In his absence she prowled around the hut, trying to restrain the urge to break something.

There was clanking sound, which turned out to be the sound of a trapdoor hitting the side of the wall as Kenobi came up from the basement level below and found her in the living room, eyeing a bulbous ceramic sculpture.

“Sit, Mara.”

His voice was gentle, but Mara responded to tone of command beneath the words and her legs folded as she dropped down onto the floor, slumping back against the couch. He placed a glass—the first she’d seen on Tatooine—on the round table in front of her and poured a clear liquid into the glass.

“Starshine of my own making. Made from fermented deb-deb.” He poured himself a glass as well.

Her eyes watered as the starshine burned its way down her throat. She smacked the empty glass back down on the table and glared at Kenobi until he refilled it.

She’d made plans before she’d met Kenobi, and those plans were all she had now—she would travel to Bestine, and then off-planet—somehow. A stolen spaceship, probably. She’d make her way across the galaxy to the Aing-Tii monks and beg them to help her get home. It might take years, but she’d do it.

And if that didn’t work, well, she’d make her way in this galaxy somehow.

Without Luke.

Without him, she’d drift like a mirage ghost wandering through the galaxy, clinging to the slender thread that was left of their bond. Until—

“If—if I’m meant to be stuck here I’m not going to stay quiet and let the timeline run its course. I know what I can do to bring down the Emperor and I’m going to do it. Even if it means I die.”

“I’m not sure that’s wise—”

“I don’t give a _fuck,_ Kenobi.”

The starshine burned.

“I just wanted to get back to my life, to—” She bit back his name, as though revealing it to Kenobi now would make any difference. She’d already said too much; there was no doubt he suspected already. “He’s infuriating you, know. Infuriating. He’s so obsessed with the Jedi, and his duty—“ And damn her if she didn’t find that attractive as well, and had for more years than she cared to admit. _“Infuriating.”_ She’d said infuriating too many times, she was sure.

 _Force_ she loved him. It had taken her so long to realize that, and now he was being taken away from her.

She kept drinking until her grip on the world began to get slippery, and she didn’t fight Kenobi when he coaxed her onto the couch. She didn’t know where he slept that night, if he did. She didn’t care.

She just wanted to go home.

  



	6. Day Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Plot details and some dialogue comes from the comics Star Wars #7. I've posted excerpts from the comic on tumblr (@celinamarniss) under the tag #tatooine.

Mara stood on the plateau above Kenobi’s hut, where she had left the shattered artifact—and her hopes for returning home—in pieces in the sand the day before. It was night. The sky above was splashed with millions of stars, their light so bright she could see the woman in front of her as clearly as though they were standing in daylight.

This visitation Padmé wore a gown in shimmering shades of blue that rippled to her feet. A cloak covered with streams of blue sequins wrapped around her shoulders, and her hair was a waterfall of dark curls that hung loose around her face and down her back, dotted with small white flowers and spiraling blue ribbons.

“You’re—” She wasn’t sure how to say what this woman was to her. “You’re Luke’s mother.” The missing piece of his family history that had been hidden from him for so long.

“I’m your family too, Mara,” the vision said, in a light, sweet voice.

Mara shook her head. That wasn’t right.

“You took an oath to love and protect my son, to stand by him for the rest of his life. You’re his family, and that makes his family yours as well.”

“I don’t feel—I don’t have that right. It isn’t the same. I don’t even know you.”

She wasn’t even sure that this vision was really the spirit of Luke’s mother, speaking through the Force, or just an embodiment that the Force had chosen to use speak to her.

“You’re not even real.” Her voice was harsh.

The ghostly woman didn’t take offense. “You’re not alone anymore.”

Her eyes felt hot and she blinked, unable to look directly at the other woman. This wasn’t _real._ It was only a vision.

“This is for you.”

Padmé lifted her hand and Mara reached out to take the small object she offered. It was a pendant made of some sort of ivory wood with crude designs carved into its surface, strung onto a delicate chain that seemed at odds with the rough workmanship of the wood.

“It’s a Japor snippet. Anakin made it for me when we first met.”

Mara shivered. “Why are you giving it to me?”

“It’s carved with Tatooine sand symbols,” Padmé continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “I looked them up after Anakin gave it to me, but I couldn’t find any records on the symbols on the holonet. When I came back to Tatooine, I asked Beru about them.”

“It’s a good luck charm.” Her finger brushed against the tiny eye-like swirls. “These symbols here mean that the giver is watching over you, protecting you. At the time, I thought it was very romantic.”

Her face crumpled as sadness and anger moved across her features before she recovered and continued. “Slaves on Tatooine use the symbols to protect their loved ones, or to tell them things they can’t speak aloud.”

Mara twisted her wrist to look at the design etched there.

Padmé’s face lit up. “The symbol for union,” she said. Her pale hand hovered over Mara’s wrist, not quite touching the lines of the tattoo. “Or: family. The linked circles can stand for both meanings.”

She looked up again, holding Mara’s gaze.

Her voice went strange as she spoke, as though there was an echo behind it. “There are many other symbols. Signs for the desert, and for travel…”

She faded away mid-sentence. Mara found herself alone, shivering the murky pre-dawn on the cliff above Kenobi’s house.

Her hands were empty.

The shattered amulet was still lying in the dust near the center of the small plateau. She picked up the pieces and walked back to the house, the first sun beginning to glimmer over the horizon as she reached the door.

Kenobi was sitting on the floor by the couch, deep in meditation. He didn’t stir when she came in. She placed the fragments of the obelisk back on the display shelf by the door.

Her head didn’t ache as badly as she’d expected after last night. She wondered if Kenobi had put something in her drink the night before, so that she would pass out before drinking herself stupid, and she wouldn’t have put it past him. She’d done that herself, for members of her crew.

The ache she felt now was something deeper. Mara didn’t have words for it. She felt hollowed out, as though someone had scraped away at the center of her.

Even though she wasn’t that hungry, she went looking in Kenobi’s kitchen for ration bars, only to come up empty-handed. No ration bars, no meal packs, no sealed nutritional portions. She was about to give up when Kenobi’s voice floated in from the living room: “There are eggs in the pantry.”

She found the eggs on a shelf; they were pale green, the size of her fist. She didn’t ask what sort of creature had laid them. A little more searching and she found spices and a little dried meat for flavor.

As she scrambled the eggs in a pan over the stove, Kenobi rose from his meditation and retrieved plates and cutlery from a shelf. The dining alcove was only designed for one, so they ate at the round table in the living room.

As ate she considered her options. Wallowing in her grief was an attractive possibility, if bad form for a Jedi, and not a good long-term plan.

Using what she knew to alter the timeline—to shape the past into something new—was tempting, but now that she’d sobered up she could recognize that it was a dangerous path to take.

Moreover, it didn’t _feel_ right. The Force hadn’t hadn’t sent her visions or dire pronouncements warning her away from meddling in the timeline, but it didn’t need to. The nagging feeling that of all her choices, that one was _wrong_ —and there were so many ways it could end in disaster—was enough. She didn’t want to face Palpatine or live through the Galactic Civil War again. She wanted something smaller, more selfish—she wanted to go home.

The obelisk was beyond repair. She had been so _sure_ that it would work; so sure that the Force had guided her to Kenobi so that she could use the artifact to return home. The runes had been the same, she was _sure._ She ran through the symbols she could remember in her head, tracing their shapes into the tabletop with her finger. Loops and interconnected circles; lines that crossed each other to form esoteric patterns.

The tip of her finger tingled.

She put her fork aside and looked up at Kenobi.

“I was wrong about the artifact. It wasn’t enough to send me back, but I think—”

She could feel a theory coming together, but it was all instinctual, based on visions and hunches—hardly reliable problem-solving methods. Unless you were a Jedi. She _was_ a Jedi now, and she couldn’t afford to ignore the intuition that whispered through her mind.

“This might sound... odd,” she said.

“If the Force is guiding you then it’s not odd at all.”

That sounded like something Luke would say. “I’m not used to trusting it,” she admitted.

“What do your feelings tell you?”

She wouldn’t have even brought it up if not for the _feeling_ that she was on the right track, like a quiet nudge at the back of her head.

“The runes on the artifacts. They’re significant—I think they may be the key.”

“So it is not the stone, but the writing that matters.”

She nodded. “The runes were the same on both stones—or similar enough. When I touched them, or traced them, I can feel a connection to— _something.”_

She didn’t want to tell him about Padmé. She traced a circle with a dot in its center, a half crescent hovering above it.

“Perhaps the runes are a way of focusing the Force—of channeling the energy of the Force into the creation of a bridge that runs through time.” He stroked his beard. He did that a lot. She was _never_ going to let Luke grow a beard.  

“Reminds me of the magic they practice on Dathomir,” she said. “They channel the Force using songs.”

“An interesting comparison.”

“But _why?”_ She flattened her palm on the table top. “I don’t need runes to levitate a datapad. Why do the runes even matter?”

“Why are the runes necessary when the Force is all around us, always there to aid us and guide when we ask for help?” He made an expansive sweep of his arm, as if encompassing all that surrounded them. “Perhaps the runes are the means of asking the Force the right question.”

She shook her head. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe there was another reason it didn’t work.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for you. A master can study the Force his whole life and still find it hold many mysteries.”

Mara scowled. She wasn’t _overly fond_ of this desert mystic routine.

“We can try your theory about the runes, if you like.” He put his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet.

She helped him clean up the breakfast dishes and he waited as she took a trip to the small fresher so that she could clean up a bit—wash her face, rebraid her hair—after having neglected to do so the night before. There was no mirror in the fresher, though that was probably for the best. It had been six days since she’d had a proper shower—one with as much hot water as she desired. She imagined that Kenobi, alone as he was up here, didn’t relish the thought of looking himself in the face every day.

Together they climbed up the slope to the plateau where the obelisk had shattered and where Mara had had her vision of Padmé. Kenobi had brought along the fragments of the obelisk, but Mara didn’t think she’d need them—the runes on the obelisk were burned into her memory now. She traced them out onto the sand with a finger, then drew all the runes from the disk that she could remember in a circle on the sand. Sitting back on her heels, she studied the two sequences. Kenobi stood to the side, quiet as he watched her work.

Brushing the sand flat, she started over. This time she combined the two set of runes, pulling symbols from one object, and then the other, until she had a row of runes sketched out on the sand before her. That didn’t seem quite right either—but she was getting closer, she could feel it.

She sat back again. Tamping down on her frustration, she brushed the runes away for the second time. She let her mind begin to drift, focusing on nothing in particular as her hand moved almost unconsciously through the pattern of lines that formed a new sequence in the sand.

Nothing. The symbols lay inert on the ground.

She frowned. “It isn’t right—there’s something missing.”

“Meditate on it,” Kenobi suggested. “I’ll join you.” He sat down on the sand across from her, crossing his legs and placing his hands on his knees. She stared at him as he closed his eyes and surrendered to the Force, the wind blowing wisps of auburn hair around his face.

Luke would have liked this, she thought sourly. He would have _loved_ the chance to sit out the in wilderness with his old mentor and commune with the Force.

She hated it.

With those resentments still churning through her head, it took her some time to clear her mind, letting her anxieties drain away until she could hear the whisper of the Force around her.

The feeling of unmooring her mind from her body was becoming a familiar one, as her sense of time and place slipped away. She could still sense Kenobi’s presence beside her in the flow of the Force. Her awareness spread out into the desert around her, the Force rippling around and through her.

There was the sudden feeling of vertigo, as though she were rushing through the air—as though she had been pulled somewhere else and was viewing a scene from above. A presence glowed at the center of it all.

_Luke._

She saw him far from the homestead, walking alone in the desert, his feet making a small trail of footprints across the sand. The second sun was dipping below the horizon as he trudged on, his face determined.

That scene slid away, replaced by another, this one set after second twilight, night already settled on the desert around him. A speeder sped across the sand toward Luke and jerked to a stop a few feet away. Her awareness flickered against the minds in that speeder—violent, stupid, and cruel. They were rushing out of the vehicle, toward the small boy—

“Luke,” she whispered. Her eyes snapped open.

“He’s in danger,” Obi-Wan said, his eyes meeting hers. As if she didn’t know that, as if her entire body didn’t hum with the strength of the Force’s warnings.

She was on her feet, turning to look across the desert in the direction of the homestead. “We have to help him, we—”

Should she? Or should she let events unfold as if she hadn’t been there at all? Was this a moment in his past that would have happened anyway, regardless of her presence?

Or was this a moment where she could intervene? The Force had gifted them both with the vision of Luke in danger—and she didn’t think the Force would have warned her if she were meant to do nothing. Perhaps saving Luke was the reason she was here, in this particular moment in his history.

She couldn’t ask Kenobi—none of this had happened for him yet.

“Will we get there in time?” They’d already lost time while in meditation—hours, she thought, by the position of the suns—and it had taken them most of the day to cross the desert from the Lars homestead the day before.

“We have to try.”

Mara already had her lightsaber and her holdout strapped to her arm, but Kenobi had to return to his hut to retrieve his weapon. He saddled the eopie while Mara filled a water jug for the journey, and in short order, they were ready to leave.

“What was Luke _thinking,_ going out into the desert tonight?” Kenobi wondered aloud as Neda began the descent down the slope.

“Could you tell who was in the speeder? Or what they wanted with Luke?”

After a moment, he said, “No. There are many violent gangs on Tatooine; ruthless men who spread terror and brutality for sport.”

All gangs on Tatooine reported to one master. Jabba.

She thought back over the tense atmosphere at the homestead and the furtive meetings with the Darklighters. She’d thought, at first, that _she_ had been the source of the tension, or that their concern was primarily over the dwindling water supply, but there had been other issues in play. The Larses feared—desperately feared—retaliation from the crime lord.

“Owen and Beru—they haven’t been paying Jabba’s water tithe,” she said. “The men who were after Luke—they could be Jabba’s men.” It didn’t explain why Luke was—or would be—out in the desert, but it was a reasonable guess as to who would find him there.

“Jabba’s record-keeping is hardly reliable. It could be that they just slipped through the cracks.” He wasn’t wrong about Jabba’s organization.

“True, but it’s not like Jabba to let any resource go unexploited, and why would they—”

Oh.

 _“You’ve_ been keeping them away from the Lars homestead.”

There was a heavy pause. “I thought it was the best way to keep that violence away from the farm.”

Mara glared at the back of his head. She understood his reasoning—and wouldn’t she have done the same thing in his position? And yet his noble intentions had ended up creating the very situation he’d tried to prevent. How could he have thought that his actions wouldn’t have consequences for the farm?

She let out a frustrated huff. It was done, and they were doing all that they could to reach Luke now.  

They rode for hours through the desert, both so intent on their destination that conversation was limited to brief exchanges on their rate of travel. Mara felt like she was going to go out of her mind when they found part of the trail blocked by a landslide and had to make their around by another route, adding several more hours on to the journey.

The suns were setting when they reached the Lars farm. The glowing arch of the door to the dome entrance was illuminated, light spilling out onto the sand. Owen stood framed by the lighted arch.

“Kenobi!” Owen called. “What are you doing here?”

Neda dropped to her knees so that Kenobi and Mara could dismount. Owen retreated into the rounded building, and they stepped down the short flight of steps to join him in the small room under the dome. Beru stood by the stairs that led down into the homestead with a slugthrower in her hands, two lanterns sitting at her feet. The single overhead light and the light from the lanterns threw cross-shadows around the room and the four figures gathered there.

“I sensed that Luke was in trouble,” Kenobi said. “We came here to see if we could aid your search.”

She could feel Owen and Beru’s fear spiral up another notch at Kenobi’s pronouncement.

“He disappeared just before dinner,” Beru said. “We’ve searched the property and we can’t find him. Do you—do you know what’s happened to him?

“Not exactly. I do know that he’s out in the desert, and I think I can find him. And I know that he’s in danger, or will be shortly.”

“Danger—how?”

“I think he went out to find the men Jabba sent to collect water taxes—”

Beru sucked in a breath.

“And you know all of this—how?” Owen growled. “What have you been up to, Kenobi?”

“We’re here to help find him,” Mara snapped. “We’re wasting time arguing about it.”

“What are you even doing here?” Owen turned on her. “How do we know _you_ didn’t signal them?”

“I don’t work for Jabba,” she said, trying to keep her tone reasonable and measured, and mostly failing. “I just want to help you search.”

“You say that you don’t, but why should even we trust you?”

 _I’m Luke’s family too,_ she wanted to scream, but she knew that claiming any right to protect him would make her look unstable and destroy any chance Owen would let her come along. Even a vote of confidence from Kenobi—who Owen didn’t trust either—wouldn’t help her case.

Kenobi said nothing.

“Owen,” Beru said. “Let Mara go with you.”

Owen hissed between his teeth.

“I trust her,” Beru continued. “She wouldn’t let Luke come to any harm, and you’ll need backup if those thugs are out there. Take Ben too, he’ll show you where to find Luke—won’t you?”

Kenobi inclined his head.

“Fine,” Owen said.

“Are you coming too?” Mara asked Beru.

She shook her head. “Someone needs to stay and keep an eye on the homestead, in case…”

She hefted the slugthrower. Mara saw her eyes dart to the lightsaber that hung from Mara’s belt, and she caught the woman’s gaze, trying to reassure her without words. _We’ll find him. We’ll bring him home._

Beru gave a short nod and touched Owen’s shoulder. “You should get going. Mara’s right, there’s no time to waste.”

Owen nodded, his face tight as he brushed past Beru into the homestead.

“He’s going to bring up the speeder from the garage,” Beru said. “You can meet him on the surface.” As they left the dome, she sealed the heavy door behind them.

Owen brought around an open-air speeder, with two rows of seats, easing it to a stop by the dome so that she and Kenobi could join him.

“Head toward the Marstrap farm,” Kenobi instructed as he climbed into the back seat of the speeder. She wasn’t sure she would have been able to pinpoint Luke’s location on her own, let alone communicate those directions to Owen. The desert all looked the same to her.

Owen didn’t protest when Mara took the passenger’s side seat. There was a single slugthrower hooked into a holder between the two sets of seats and a medpack wedged in the well at her feet. As soon as the doors to the speeder had closed, Owen pushed the accelerator and the speeder shot out into the night.

She knew that her holdout was in top condition but force of habit had her checking the powerpack and trigger pull as they traveled. She barely resisted doing the same for Owen’s slugthrower, but she did pull the medpack out to familiarize herself with its contents.

“There,” she heard Kenobi say softly behind her. A light appeared in the distance, and as they approached resolved into a set of headlights on a stationary speeder parked on the salt flat. Like Owen’s, it was open-air, with a double row of seats for its five passengers, though the triangular hood tapered to a squarish nose and the vehicle boasted a pair of heavy engine turbines on both sides of a large storage compartment in the rear.

A group was huddled together a short distance from a speeder, their shapes lit up by the headlights. There were two Weequays, a pair of droids, or perhaps cyborgs, and a man in a turban whose species she couldn’t determine in the low light.

Luke was on the ground, unmoving.

Her heart lurched and she reached out, brushing her mind against the mind of the unconscious child huddled on the sand. He wasn’t dead—she knew that already; she could feel his presence glimmering in the Force—but relief still washed through her when she touched his mind and found that he wasn’t in any pain.

The thugs stood in a loose circle around his body, turning to look as Owen’s speeder approached. They were armed, and swung their blasters around to point toward the oncoming vehicle.

Owen cursed under his breath as he jerked the speeder to a stop and fumbled for the slugthrower tucked beside him.

“Wait,” she said. She laid her hand on Owen’s shoulder— _concentrated_ —and the man slumped to the side, unconscious.

“Was that entirely necessary?” Kenobi said.

“Yes,” Mara said. She didn’t want him to see whatever she and Kenobi were about to do.

She stood, stepping up onto the seat of the speeder and then over the windshield and onto the hood of the vehicle.

One of the thugs held up a hand, shielding his eyes from the speeder’s bright light. “What is this? A sand rat? What do you want, sand rat?”

Mara laughed, a low, unsettling note. They thought she wasn’t a threat. They were very, very wrong.

She’d spent the last six days thrown off-balance, pretending to be an innocuous visitor in a world that was utterly alien to her, with rules and customs she didn’t understand. But teaching a kingpin’s scum that if they touched a farmer’s child they would regret it for the rest of their days— _this_ she understood.

“Give up the boy,” Kenobi called from behind her. “And you won’t have any trouble tonight.”

“Hah,” one of the Weequays scoffed. “This little thief is ours now. He’ll fetch a good price on the slave markets.”

Mara felt a prickle across her skin and shifted slightly to the side to let a blaster bolt sizzle by her shoulder.

Turban was trigger-happy. Noted. From where they stood she was only a silhouette in the dark, and with the headlights in his eyes he couldn’t get a clear shot, but he’d tried to hit her anyway.

When she didn’t move, they closed in, sauntering toward Owen’s speeder. Mara waited until they’d left Luke behind them in the sand. She felt a surge of power from Kenobi and the lights on the other speeder blew out with a loud popping sound, transparasteel shattering outward in a shimmering spray. The thugs shouted, spinning around at the sound to face what they assumed was an attack coming from behind them.

 _Sloppy._ Jabba’s men were brawlers and bullies, with no sense of strategy.

She took the opportunity Kenobi had given her and vaulted off of the hood, landing in the middle of the group and lunging for Turban, who now had his back to her as he gaped at the other speeder. She leapt up onto his back, wrenching his blaster arm up until he pitched forward on to the ground. Bracing her knees on his shoulders, she slammed his head into the dirt until she was sure he wouldn’t get up again any time soon.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the tall red droid reach for Turban’s blaster which has fallen a few feet away. She threw out a hand and used the Force to send the blaster sliding out of the droid’s grip and into the dark.

“My gun! I can’t hold it! It’s…” Around them, more weapons were jerked out their owner’s hands and sailed away.

Mara grinned. Kenobi was making himself useful.

The silver droid managed to get off a shot before losing hold of his blaster, and Mara rolled away just in time to avoid getting hit. A large boulder came flying out of nowhere and crushed the droid into the ground. Mara ducked as sand and bits of stone sprayed up at the point of impact. The droid twitched and let out a mechanical howl before deactivating.

She lifted her head in time to see one of the Weequays rush towards her. Mid-step he went flying into the air, screaming as he fell back to the earth some distance away, landing with an audible crunch.

“But… but... how...” the other Weequay sputtered.

She laughed again. The Weequay’s eyes narrowed as he watched her pull herself to her feet. Having lost his blaster to Kenobi’s Force tricks, he sidled over to the speeder and pulled out a club from the back seat and came around to the front of the vehicle, putting the speeder at his back as he faced her.

He swung the club in a wide arc, and when it didn’t go flying out of his hands, shot her a smug grin. She stepped back, calculating her next line of attack. The club went whistling through the air again as the Weequay grew bolder and took a step closer.

Behind him, the hood of the speeder popped up, shards of transparasteel from the shattered lights flying in all directions. _Kenobi._ The Weequay shouted in surprise, his head turning away from Mara. She darted forward and struck him in the chest so that he staggered backward and fell onto the exposed engine of the speeder. The hood came down again with crack and enough force to knock the Weequay senseless.

One left.

The last of Jabba’s thugs still standing was the red droid. It had a large, insectoid head with bulbous, glassy eyepieces that glinted in the light of the headlamps as it crouched above Luke, holding a vibroblade to Luke’s chest.

When it spoke its voice had a deep, mechanical drone. “I have the boy! Stay back or I kill him! I swear to you, I will gut him like a bantha at—”

She backed off, let him see her hands.

“You are not a registered farmer.” The red droid made a whirring sound as it studied her. “You are not in my data banks.”

“That’s because I don’t exist.” The smile that had unsettled the Weequay didn’t have the same effect on a droid, but it didn’t matter.

She stepped back again, further from the droid’s sensors. She could sense Kenobi in the dark somewhere to her right. He had another boulder suspended the in air before him, but he couldn’t strike the droid down so close to Luke.

Her hands still raised, she began to walk sideways, circling the droid. It turned its head to watch her until she’d stepped out of its line of vision and it was forced to shuffle sideways, leaning away from Luke, in order to keep her in its sights. It was just enough space for her to act.

She reached out with the Force and yanked the droid forward so that it staggered away from Luke to meet the boulder that barreled out of the darkness and slammed into its body with enough power to propel them both several meters away.

Mara dropped her hands. Kenobi emerged from whatever shadow he’d been hiding in beyond the stretch of space illuminated by the lights from Owen’s speeder, his face shadowed by the hood of his cloak.

“Thanks for the back-up,” she said. “It was well-timed.”

“Not bad for a desert hermit?” he said with a wry smile, tilting his head. “I was a Jedi in a time of war,” he reminded her. “As were you, I would venture to guess.”

She nodded. The Jedi that came before him had known centuries of peace. It was hard for her to imagine; she had been raised to fight in a war that had begun before she was born had only just come to an end.

“You didn’t kill them,” Kenobi observed, looking over the prone bodies of Jabba’s thugs.

She’d made sure that none of the men scattered across ground were conscious, but she hadn’t struck to kill. Even the droids could be repaired.

“No,” Mara said. She stepped over the crumpled legs of the droid. “There was no need to kill them. He’s going to kill them all.”

Kenobi watched her wordlessly as she turned away from the bodies on the ground. Let him think she meant Jabba, and not the small boy curled into the sand.

She didn’t care about sparing the likes of men who enforced Jabba’s laws, but—timelines. Who knew what sort of fissure a death would cause in the sequence of events to come.

That didn’t mean she couldn’t be petty. She levered up the hood of the speeder and shoved the unconscious Weequay’s body off of the engine. It didn’t take long to disable everything except the comms.

When she had finished, she found Kenobi was crouched over Luke, his hand on the boy’s chest. He was pulling deep in the Force, healing whatever damage had been done—a light concussion, she’d guess—when Luke had been knocked unconscious.

“He won’t wake until we after we reach the homestead.” He stood, and, walking past her, returned to the back seat of Owen’s speeder and closed his eyes, letting his head loll.

“What are you—?” She followed him to the speeder and stared at his prone form.

“I’m suffering the effects of the knock-drug that Jabba’s goons hit us with—” he cracked open an eye. “Or was that not the lie you were going to tell him?”

She grunted, and he slumped back down again.

“Owen.” She reached out and shook Owen’s shoulder, pulling him out of unconsciousness as she did so.

He jerked awake, starting at her blearily for a moment before registered where he was. “Luke?”

“He’s safe. Over here.”

Owen practically leapt out of the speeder and hurried over to Luke. He crouched down, running his hands over Luke’s head and sides, searching for any sign of an injury.

“Jabba’s men threw a coma grenade. It knocked everyone out, including them. I just woke up and found him.”

Owen looked past her, to the bodies on the ground. She used the Force to push his attention away from the thugs, so that he wouldn’t look closely enough to tell that the men had been in combat before they’d fallen.

“We should leave before they wake up. Are you good to drive?” she asked, drawing his gaze back to her.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” He lifted Luke up and carried him to the speeder. To her surprise he passed Luke to her, watching her as she settled into the passenger’s seat, Luke arranged on her lap, before he took his seat.

“I’m not groggy at all,” he murmured to himself as he turned on the speeder’s engine. As he drove Owen kept glancing over, as if to make sure Luke was still there. Luke slept on.

His face was pressed against her shoulder, rocking gently with the motion of the speeder. She brushed his hair gently back. “It’s going to be okay, kiddo,” she said softly. It sounded like something she’d heard Han say to Jaina or Jacen.

 _This_ was what Luke—her Luke—wanted: a small person to take care of, to protect—a child that was part of both of them.

The weight of a small head leaning against her chest.

Her own childhood—her past—was dead and Mara didn’t miss it. But now— _now_ she wanted to build something new with Luke. _Now_ she could picture a future with a child—little boy or girl with Luke’s eyes and smile. It wasn’t something she had ever allowed herself to _want_ before. It had been Luke’s dream, not hers.  A child that you’d made and poured all of your love into was terrifying in so many ways, ways she probably couldn’t even imagine yet. She wasn’t sure this new longing was welcome, but she couldn’t deny that it had rooted itself somewhere in the vicinity of her chest, blooming through her as she held this small version of Luke in her arms.

She and Luke— _her_ Luke—could talk about it, later, when she got home. They had time.

Midway through the drive, Kenobi pretended to wake and wondered aloud what had happened, affecting surprise and relief when she and Owen filled him in. She let Owen do most of that talking, though he admitted that there wasn’t much to tell: they’d gotten lucky, and through a combination of the gang’s stupidity and good timing they had been able to sneak away without a fight. Owen was concerned that the thugs might wake and try to hunt them down, but Kenobi had reassured him—with the faintest hint of Force suggestion—that Jabba’s men would simply cover up their failure and the Larses didn’t have to worry about reprisals. Mara was sure that Kenobi would ensure that this proved true.

It didn’t seem like much time passed before the homestead came into view, the lighted arch of the doorway welcoming them home. Beru came running out of the dome as they approached, nearly barreling into the side of the speeder when she saw Luke in Mara’s arms.

“He’s okay,” Mara said. “Just got knocked out.”

Beru leaned over the side of the vehicle, going over Luke the same way the Owen had, her fingers searching his neck and shoulders, back and sides.

“Are you sure?” Beru asked as she passed her hands over Luke’s head.

“He’s okay, Beru,” Owen said. “It was a gas. We were all knocked out.”

Owen came around to her side of the speeder and lifted Luke out of her arms. The cold night air rushed against her front where Luke had been a warm weight.

Luke mumbled something incoherent into Owen’s shoulder. She could see something ease in Beru’s face at the sound.

“Let’s get him in bed,” Owen said to Beru, and the couple headed into the homestead, carrying Luke with them. Mara stood by the speeder, watching them go.

“Owen has offered to drive us back,” Kenobi told her as he slipped out of the backseat. “In the large speeder truck they use to take supplies to town, so that we can take Neda with us. I’ll get her ready.” He wandered off to fetch his eopie.  

She was alone in the near dark, the light from the dome spilling out onto the sand near her feet. It was cold, she realized, rubbing her arms. She could hear Kenobi speaking softly to Neda in the dark. Above her, the stars were impossibly bright, a shining map of constellations that were foreign to her. Tatooine was beautiful at night.

“Mara.” She dropped her head to see Beru coming up the steps. “I wanted to thank you for going out and helping to find Luke and bring him home. It meant so much to both of us.”

Mara jerked her head in a stiff nod, trying not to flinch at the gratitude rolling off of Beru, warm as a Tatooine morning.

“Of course,” Mara said. “I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t let anything happen to Luke.”

“I know,” Beru said. “I’m glad that everyone came back safe. Jabba’s men—they’re a dangerous lot. I know that Owen isn’t very… effusive, but he was grateful for your help too. We both are.”

“Luke’s a good kid. He’s lucky to have you.”

“We do our best,” Beru said with a wry smile.

 _You have no idea what he’ll grow into,_ she thought. They would never see the man he would become; never know what he would achieve and overcome through sheer determination and generosity of heart. It had all started here, under the care and guidance of a pair of moisture farmers who had taken him in and loved him.

This was their last conversation, Mara realized, and there was so much she couldn’t say.

She couldn’t tell Beru how long it had taken her to realize how much she loved the man they had raised. That she found him infuriating and that he made her laugh, and she could be struck by the smallest gesture—the way he reached for her hand even before she knew she needed reassurance, or the soft look on his face when she was ranting about something inane, like skyrocketing shipping taxes—and her chest would hurt with love for him.

Beru would die nearly a decade before Mara and Luke even met. She would never meet Leia and Han and the rest of Luke’s family. She would never see Luke marry. If they did have children, Beru would never even hear their names.

The quiet stretched between them for a few long moments, before Beru glanced back at the homestead. “I should get back to Luke…”

“I have a question—” Mara said quickly. Kenobi might know, but Beru—Beru came from three generations of Tatooine moisture farmers. “It might sound strange, but—please humor me. What’s the sand symbol for travel?”

“The symbol for travel?” Whatever Beru had expected her to ask, it wasn’t that. “Which one?”

It was Mara’s turn to stare a Beru in confusion.

“What sort of travel? By land or by spaceship? A family traveling alone or to a funeral? Those are all different signs.”

Mara was at a loss. She couldn’t just ask for the symbol for _time travel,_ if such a thing even existed, which she doubted.

Beru bent down and drew a circle in the sand with a line pointing down. “This is the symbol for a single traveler.” She drew three parallel lines beside it. “This is a traveler heading home to her family.”

Mara looked down at the simple shapes drawn in the sand. There was a tight knot in her throat. “Thank you,” she said softly.

Beru straightened and reached out to catch Mara’s hand in her own. “Thank you for bringing Luke home. I hope you find your husband.”

Mara nodded. “I will. Thank you.”

“Safe travels.” Beru squeezed her hand before she let it drop, and then turned back to the dome, lit up by the arch of light before she disappeared down into the earth.

She would never see Beru again.

 

— —

 

Mara was up before dawn, too tense with anticipation up to sleep any longer. Kenobi was already up, puttering around the kitchen.

She dressed the clothes she had worn when she’d arrived on Tatooine, returning the clothes Beru had given her to the satchel she’d borrowed. On top of the bundle, she put the big, stupid hat that had saved her skin from frying during her trip through the desert. Kenobi could return them after she left.

When she had finished, he joined her in the living room at the table where they’d eaten together the day before. “Good morning,” he said, passing her a cup of caf.

She took a sip. The caf was thick and gritty, the taste truly appalling. _Kreth,_ she couldn’t wait to get off of this planet.

“Terrible, I know,” Kenobi said, a glimmer of a smile at his lips. “Not as bad as the stuff we drank on the front in the Clone Wars, but what I wouldn’t give for a cup of Alderaanian springbean caf.”

Alderaanian caf was harder to get in her time. Not impossible, but rare and expensive.

“I prefer an Ithorian dark roast,” Mara said.

“Ah, that sounds lovely.”

She smiled back at him over the rim of her cup.

“You’re welcome to stay for breakfast, but I suspect you want to try to travel back to your time again.”

“Yes,” she said simply, draining her cup and setting it aside.

It was still dark out. The wind cut through the thin dress clothes she wore and she wished she had kept the jacket the Beru had loaned her. The plateau looked even more desolate and empty in the dark, the wastes below filled with jagged shadows.

She walked to the center of the plateau, to the spot where she had stood the day before when her attempt to travel back had failed. Kenobi kept his distance, watching her from under his hood as he stood at the edge of the plateau.

She sunk to her knees as she fell into a meditative state, opening herself fully so that the Force could pour into her. Time lost all meaning as she was suffused with the light that bound all living beings together, luminous and strange.

When she opened her eyes, the sun was glimmering on the horizon. The stars had been washed out of the sky as it began to lighten and the air held the crispness of approaching the dawn.

While suspended in meditation she had seen that there were many pathways in the Force, many bridges and doors that would allow one to travel across the boundaries of time and space. For a fraction of a second, she had glimpsed the scope of it—enough to know that she would never be able to map her way through without a guide, without—

_Asking the right question._

_Here I am._ She sketched the signs Beru had taught her into the sand; the circle with the line pointing down, and then the three lines beside it. _This is where I want to go. Home._

The runes from the disk spiraled out from that point, joined by the runes from the obelisk. Beru’s symbols acted as the bridge, linking the runes from the two artifacts in a large circle in the sand.

She felt a subtle tug, like a line pulling her forward, and she stepped carefully into the center of the circle.

“Mara,” Kenobi called. “Will I see him again?”

“Yes,” Mara said. “You will, but—”

“No.” He held up a hand. “Don’t tell me my future. It will play out how it must play out, however the Force wills it.” He smiled at her. “You’ve given me hope, Mara. I didn’t know how much I needed that hope. Thank you for that. May the Force be with you.”

She wished she could say more. He would be gone before she had the chance to meet him again.

“Goodbye, Obi-Wan. Thank you.”  

Dropping to one knee, she scratched the final symbol into the earth with her finger. Two circles, linked together. As she lifted her hand a now-familiar shock snapped across her fingers and a surge of power rippled out across the plateau.  

She looked up one last time to see Kenobi lift a hand in farewell, a small smile at the corner of his mouth—before everything around her disappeared.

She was falling again.

 


	7. Homecoming

“ _The brothers have gone to bed,”_ a voice sang, _“put up your feet, lay down your head.”_

Aunt Beru’s voice, singing an old lullaby that she used to sing when he was little, drew Luke out of sleep. He blinked up at the red and brown geometric patterns that marched across the ceiling above his head.

The singing stopped. “Luke.” The lamp beside his bed cast a warm glow over his Aunt, sitting beside him on the bed. “How are you feeling?”

“Hmm, okay,” he said.

“Does anything hurt?”

He shook his head; stretched his legs and wiggled his toes. He still felt tired, but nothing hurt.

“Do you remember what happened?”

He thought for a moment. He remembered sneaking out of the homestead, past the last vaporator spire and out into the desert to find Jabba’s men. They hadn’t come to the farm yet but he knew that Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen were dreading their arrival.

It gave him a sick feeling in his stomach that hadn’t gone away all day. So he’d gone out to confront Jabba’s men himself—because he _knew_ that they’d be out there tonight, halfway to the Marstrap farm. He wanted to steal back the water and return it to the farmers they’d stolen it from.

It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It didn’t seem like such a good idea now.

What happened when he’d reached the thugs’ speeder was a little blurry now. He remembered them all surrounding him and how angry it had made him, so angry that he’d forgotten to feel scared, even though Jabba’s men were tough men, much bigger than him and armed. He knew that they killed farmers sometimes. He’d heard stories.

“You were hit on the head,” Aunt Beru said. “And left out in the desert. Uncle Owen found you.”

Aunt Beru didn’t have to tell him that if Uncle Owen hadn’t found him he could have died. He’d been taught what to do to survive if he were ever lost, but there were so many ways to die in the desert. That’s why Mara was lucky they’d found her.

“We’ll discuss your punishment in the morning.”

That wouldn’t be fun. He was already in Uncle Owen’s bad books.

With everything that had happened in the last day, he realized that hadn’t really apologized for that. “I’m sorry I told about the locker code.”

He was only half-sorry, he realized. He’d liked learning to shoot a blaster, and he didn’t think that Uncle Owen would have let him go with Mara if he hadn’t sneaked the code. Even if Uncle Owen had said it was okay, there had been something exciting about sneaking out without them knowing about it. He had liked knowing something that they didn’t.

And shooting had been _fun._ He wanted a blaster like Mara’s when he grew up. He was sorry that she had left the day before. He wondered what she would say about what had happened tonight.

“Did Mara ever say anything strange to you?” Aunt Beru asked.

Luke shrugged. She hadn’t talked to him very much—she didn’t talk much at all, even at dinner when Aunt Beru asked her questions. The most she talked to him had been when they were working on the Eetwo together, and then she just talked about what she was doing.

Then he thought of something; not strange, but different. “She showed me a tattoo she had and she said it was from Tatooine even though I’ve never seen any tattoos like that. Did you ever get a tattoo, Aunt Beru?”

His Aunt had never said anything about having a tattoo, but he knew that people could have them removed or hidden in places under their clothes, so there was a possibility that she might have kept it a secret from him. Luke knew that Aunt Beru didn’t tell him everything.

“No, of course not. Tattoos are for slaves—or pirates.” It was clear that Aunt Beru didn’t approve of tattoos. He filed that information away for later.

“She didn’t say anything else, did she? Or ask you about your parents?”

Luke shook his head. He couldn’t understand what Aunt Beru was getting at.

Mara had been different from anyone he’d ever met on Tatooine, but he assumed that was because she came from so far away. She had told him she was from Imperial Center, at the heart of the galaxy. He’d never met anyone from the Core before.  

“Can I go see Imperial Center someday?”

Beru looked amused. “If you went, who would help us take care of the farm?”

“I wouldn’t go _forever,”_ Luke promised. He yawned.

“It’s late,” Aunt Beru said. “Do you think you could sleep a little more?”

“Yeah.” He was still tired. He rolled onto his side, squirming a little until he was comfortable.

Aunt Beru tucked the blanket around him. “You know your Uncle and I will always be there to protect you.”

“Uh-huh.”

When he was little he used to talk himself to sleep and Aunt Beru would sit by his side and listen until he drifted off. Some nights she’d sing him lullabies like she had tonight. Eventually, Aunt Beru said he had to learn to fall asleep on his own, and she always left after she’d made sure he’d turned off his datapad and was in bed. He wasn’t a little kid anymore, but he didn’t want her to leave.

“Can you stay, Aunt Beru?” he mumbled.

“I’ll stay.” She sat beside him, stroking his side.

He closed his eyes, and then opened them again. “Is she going to find Lando?”

“Who?” Beru looked puzzled.

“Mara? Is she going to find him?”

“Oh. Of course, sweetheart.” She brushed his hair away from his temple. “She’ll find him and she’ll go home.”

“Good,” he mumbled into his pillow. He hoped she’d come back and visit again.

“You can sing another one,” he said. “The one about the constellations.” It was his favorite.

“Alright,” Aunt Beru said. She brushed her hand through his hair again. _“Follow the stars, my heart, follow the suns. Look to the hunter, my heart, watch how she runs…”_

 

— —

 

She kept her feet this time.

She braced herself for the nauseating rush as her body was yanked across decades, drawing on the Force to keep herself steady and the contents of her stomach from lurching out of her mouth. Through sheer determination, she kept her legs from buckling when they landed on solid ground again—the impact jolting through her body as her feet hit the floor of her living room and the apartment materialized around her.

Luke stood on the other side of the room, his mouth agape. He was holding the disk-shaped artifact in his hands and he looked as though he hadn’t slept in weeks.

“Mara?” He gasped. “Mara!”

The artifact slipped from his fingers and fell to the ground, shattering. She crossed the room, stepping over the shards and into his arms.

“Farmboy,” she sighed. _“Luke.”_

The link sang between them, his presence rushing into hers, filling all the dark and hollow spaces in her mind with his light.

“You just disappeared!” he said into her shoulder.

“How many days?” she asked.

“Six days.”

“Six days!” Her laugh was shaky. She’d avoided the fate of those holo-time-travelers who had lost years, decades, _centuries_ with their loved ones when they returned too late to the future.

“The artifact broke, on my end, and then—” Then she was sure she was trapped, if only for an evening; that long evening. “I didn’t know if I’d ever get back.”

“How _did_ you get back?” He gently brushed aside tendrils of hair that had slipped loose from her braid.

“The sand symbols were the key. I drew them in the sand and did something with the Force and—I don’t know,” she said. She was babbling. She knew that when she told him the entire story he’d pour over every detail, eager to figure out why the now-destroyed artifacts had opened a door to the past for her, and only her, and how the Force had guided her back to him. “I don’t. Kriffing. Care.”

The apartment was even more of a disaster than when she’d left. All of the furniture in the living room had been pushed up against the walls. The couch jutted out at an awkward angle in the corner, a table was heaped with books that looked like they came from Luke’s collection of ancient Jedi texts, and random odds and ends were cluttered about. A sculpture she’d brought back from Ryloth was shattered in a corner.

None of that mattered. What mattered was that she was _home._ Luke—her Luke—was standing in front of her, looking at her as though she were infinitely precious.

“You need a haircut,” she blurted out.

He laughed. She brushed a hand across his cheek, the stubble catching on her fingers. It wasn’t a week’s worth...

“Leia sent Han over to make sure I ate and cleaned myself up,” Luke said. “I haven’t left the apartment, much.”

“We should let them know,” Mara said.

“Yes,” Luke agreed but made no move toward the comm center. Instead, he pulled her close again, burying his face in her neck, his body shuddering in her arms as he sucked in deep breaths.

“Okay?” she asked softly.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice rough. He pulled back again, and stared at her, his hands framing her cheeks, rubbing along the cheekbone.

“I didn’t think that the Force was cruel enough to take you away forever,” Luke said. “But I didn’t know where you were—you felt so far away, like I’d never be able to touch you again...”

Kissing him made it difficult to look at him, and after a minute she pulled back to take him in again.

 _I love you I missed you I never want to leave you again_ surged back and forth across the bond, more a series of impressions than words. _I missed you it was so lonely in my head without you._

She let him lead her the few steps it took to the couch, and they spent long, wonderful moments being lost in each other. His lips pressed to her lips, to her cheeks, to her temple and eyelids. His hand stroked her jawline and neck, the other curled around her, holding her close. Her hands tangled tightly in his shirt.

He eased back eventually, to look at her again. They were still entangled; her left leg flung over his leg, ankle hooked under his left knee. One of her hands cupped his neck, the other enclosed in both of his, his thumb brushing back and forth across her knuckles.

“Where did you go?” he asked.

“Tatooine. _Your_ Tatooine. The Force sent me back in time—back to Tatooine to when you were a little boy.”

She almost laughed at the confusion on his face. “I don’t know how or why. I stayed at the homestead for four days. I met Obi-Wan. I met you. You thought I was going to be a farmhand like Kay and Neri.”

He laughed. “Kay and Neri. I haven’t thought about them in… decades. We had other farmhands on and off, but I don’t remember you...”

“I’m glad—I was worried I’d kriffed up the timeline somehow.”

He frowned, brow furrowed, and she could tell he was searching his memories of the people who had passed through the farmstead during his childhood; flipping through a mental list of farmhands who had worked for Owen and Beru.  

“I taught you to shoot a blaster.”

Realization dawned on his face. “I remember! The woman we found in the desert. That was _you?”_

“That was me.”

He chuckled. “I think I remember the red hair. It was rare on Tatooine.” He lifted a hand to toy with a loose strand.

A line appeared between his brows and he reached up to pull her hand away from his neck. He turned her left hand in his and lightly traced his fingers over her wrist. “And the tattoo… I remember the tattoo now. I’d forgotten, but...it must have stuck somewhere deep in my memory...”

She shivered. Kriffing time travel.

“Do you remember the night you went out to confront Jabba’s thugs?”

He tilted his head. “Not very well,” he said. “I fell and hit my head, or something like that. Uncle Owen found me out in the desert. I was grounded for months afterward, I remember that.”

“Jabba’s men knocked you out. Obi-Wan and I helped Owen rescue you.”

“You always rescue me,” he said, fondly. “You saved me the very first time you found me.”

“It's a bad habit,” she tossed back.

He grinned and kissed her temple.

“What was—how were Owen and Beru?”

“Protective,” she said, smiling wryly. “They were generous hosts, but they didn’t like having a stranger on the farmstead. Worried I might bring trouble to the farm.”

She paused for a beat. “Owen didn’t care for me,” she said; it felt like an apology. “I think—if the circumstances had been different…”

“I’m sure that they would have both loved you,” Luke said.

She wasn’t so sure. All she’d had was an uneasy series of long days under the roof of a couple who had treated her as a possible threat. She’d earned their respect, but she would never have the opportunity to earn their trust.

They’d been offended enough when she told them she was a smuggler; what would they have thought if Luke brought home a woman who had been raised by Palpatine and had killed in his name? A woman who wasn’t just _any_ smuggler, but who was second-in-line to the most successful smuggling organization on the Fringe?

She pictured Luke’s family line: Beru and Owen, Shmi and Cliegg, and the generations of Lars and Whitesun moisture farmers reaching back into time. Good people, who believed in honest work and had the desert deep in their bones. She was sure that she wasn’t the woman they’d had in mind for Luke. They probably hoped he would marry a capable moisture farmer’s wife, who knew how to care for bloddle and make ahrisa and could nurture a community in the harsh, unforgiving desert.

Like Beru.

“And Aunt Beru?” Luke asked quietly.

“She was kind,” she said, realizing she was echoing what Beru had said about Shmi. “I don’t think she ever fully trusted me either, but she was still generous and kind to me. I liked her.”

Life on Tatooine was brutal and the desert could drain all tenderness out of the people who lived there like moisture out of the air. But Beru and Owen poured all their care and affection into Luke, and kept him safe from the Empire for nineteen years.

She would always love them for that.

“I’m glad I got to meet them,” she said softly.

She might have been an unwilling and resentful time traveler, but now that she was home again she could look back over her time on Tatooine and realize what a gift the Force had given her. She pulled her right hand free and reached into her jacket, brushing against the hard square shape tucked safely into an inner pocket. Another gift.

“Beru told me about your mother.”

“My mother—my _birth_ mother?”

She smiled, feeling the shape of the holocube under her fingers.

“I know who she is.”

When he looked at her, his face open and hopeful, she caught a glimpse of the child he had been. "Tell me," he said.  

She took his hand, and began.

**Author's Note:**

> While this fic is updating I'll be posting related images, maps, and meta on my tumblr @celinamarniss. You can find all of the related material in the #tatooine tag.


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